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PERSIAN 
MINIATURES 

tVINTER 




THE SUBLIME PORTE OF KAZVIN 



PERSIAN 
MINIATURES 

By H-."Gi' pWIGHT 

AUTHOR OF ''STAMBOUL NIGHTS" 




ILLUSTRATED WITH DRAWINGS 
BY 

WILFRED J. JONES 



GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1918 



MOUNT PLEASANT BRANCH 



^S 






Copyright, 1917, hy 
DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 



Bl ^ PUBLIC LIBRAlgY 



4 56 086 






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5r 



FOR 

00 CLARA KHANUM AND CECIL SAH'B 

(D 

— "I have eaten your bread and salt, 

I have drunk your water and wine, 
The deaths you died J have watched beside 
And the lives that you lived were mine." 

lO 

CM 



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CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Confidential xi 

I. Caucasian Prologue 3 

II. Anabasis 20 

III. Kazvin 42 

IV. The Country of the Sky 62 

V. The Bazaar 71 

VI. Leaf from the Book of Ser Marco Polo . 89 

VII. Persian Apparatus 92 

VIII. Jimmy & Co 113 

IX. The Great Slaughter 121 

X. Old Wine in New Bottles 151 

XI. The Factory 177 

XII. The Satrap 188 

XIII. About Rug Books (But to Be Skipped by 

Those Who Neither Read nor Write 

Them) 196 

XIV. The Gramophone 236 

XV. The Sea of Sciences 243 

XVI. Wild Boar 258 

XVII. Vignette of a Time Gone By .... 283 

XVI 1 1. Avicenna 288 

XIX. The Caravan 324 

vii 



^ 



ILLUSTRATIONS 
The Sublime Porte of Kazvin .... Frontispiece 



PAGE 



Colophon: Persian prayer rug in the Metropolitan 
Museum {See title page) 

Headpiece 3 

Boats at Enzcli 20 

Pilgrims 39 

The Tomb of Prince Hosein 42 

Hamadan Street . 73 

The Office , 77 

A Court in the Bazaar 85 

Pot Shops 87 

The Tomb of Esther and Mordecai 91 

Ye Laundress 103 

Ye Butler 107 

The Flagellants 122 

Zobeida's Litter 145 

A Mourner of Kerbela 149 

Rug Weavers 177 

Hamadan and Mt. Elvend 196 

The Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil . 243 

The Tomb of Avicenna 288 

Camels 324 



IX 



CONFIDENTIAL 

*'In good sooth, my masters, this is no door. But it is a 
little window which looketh into a great worlds 

NO, dubious reader. Your book is no treatise 
on those little pictures, sometimes gaily 
coloured, sometimes faintly sketched, of tur- 
baned princes and flowering trees and dancing 
gazelles, which it has become so much the fashion to 
collect — and to forge. It contains not even one photo- 
graph of a true Persian miniature; though if the war had 
not made it impossible for me to get hold of a certain 
portrait by the great Behzad, I would have borrowed it to 
reflect distinction on my pages. And having learned by 
pungent experience that ye reviewer is somewhat given to 
jumping from a title to a conclusion, and then visiting his 
disappointment upon ye scribbler's head, I make it my 
duty to give warning as loudly as I may that no Orientalist 
need waste time in turning over these pages. They con- 
tain nothing but a collection of sketches in printer's ink, 
very decousus, as that good friend of mine among their 
worships the editors said who best understands the sub- 
tle art of gilding a pill, in praying me to excuse him the 
honour of presenting a few of them to his public — very 
**unsewn,'' illustrating in their random way but one small 
corner of Persia, and designed not at all to catch the eye 

xi 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

of the serious-minded. For my experience of the Land 
of the Sun was such as might have been gained by a 
mechanic sent out to instal a force-pump for a travelled 
Khan, or by a gentleman's gentleman in the diplomatic 
service whose master fell ill by the way and never reached 
Tehran. I had friends; the destiny of my friends led 
them to Hamadan; they were good enough to invite me to 
follow them; I did so a little more promptly, I fear, than 
they expected. The rest was pure cacoethes scrihendi — 
aggravated by the fact that I happened to be in that 
remote theatre of the Push to the East when the German 
War broke out. 

I can admit, however, that I thought twice before suc- 
cumbing to this incurable itch of the writer to make 
copy out of what he sees and hears, and that in the end 
I made next to nothing of any journalistic timeliness. If 
I had been an Englishman, perhaps, I would not have 
ventured to add a volume even half as portly as it might 
have been to a bibliography so rich as that of Persia. Yet 
I have never been of those who look at English and 
American literature as at two separate things. When 
the East India Company was formed, when Abbas the 
Great invited the British factors to help him drive the 
Portuguese out of the Persian Gulf, my ancestors had not 
emigrated to New England; and when they did they only 
secured my title to share in the great Anglo-Saxon tradi- 
tion of the gentleman adventurer. Not that I mean to 
qualify them as gentlemen, or my own slight and com- 
fortable experience of Persia as an adventure. But hav- 
ing had a far more prolonged experience of other parts of 
the Near East, I take a particular interest in that exten- 
sive literature of our language which interprets the East 

xii 



CONFIDENTIAL 

to the West. It has counted for not a little, I am per- 
suaded, in the unparalleled success of Great Britain as a 
colonial power. And I must further admit that I have 
been unable to put away from myself an ambition of 
contributing my mite to that literature. 

As an American I have felt at greater liberty to do so 
because our half of the race has grown up in a greater 
isolation. Much of the anomaly of our position during 
the early part of the war was due to the simple fact that 
many good Americans seriously believe the world to have 
been created in 1492. If we took cognisance at all of 
the hypothesis that there might be a world outside our 
own, we saw it from too great a distance to credit its 
reality, or to imagine ourselves as bound with it in one 
fate. And we attached to a school atlas something of 
the finality claimed for Holy Writ. This yellow patch 
was literally Austria. That crimson splotch was no more 
than Germany, and must have been so from all time. 
And Strasbourg and Serayevo were as integral parts of 
them as Potsdam or Schonbrunn. All too slowly did 
what was going on in Europe come to mean anything to 
us, because we knew too little what underlay it all. 

As for so remote a corner of the world as Persia, it is 
too much to expect that many of my own fellow-country- 
men, at any rate, are ready to believe in its existence. 
Still, anything that attempts to make even so shadowy a 
land a little less shadowy is perhaps worth trying. It 
was not for me, of course, to do so in any encyclopedic 
way. Too many scholars now living have written of the 
history, the geography, the literature, the antiquities, the 
resources, and the politics of Persia for a mere impression- 
ist to compete with them in their own generation. The 

xiii 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Persian bibliography, however, contains other names, 
like those of the inimitable old Sir Thomas Herbert, of 
Sir John Malcolm, of " Hajji Baba" Morier, and of Lord 
Curzon's enviable relative Lord Zouche. Their books, 
or some of their books, while less compendious are per- 
haps more successful in evoking the true Iranic flavour. 
For they exemplify the saying of Sadi that "a little is a 
proof of much, and a sample as good as an ass-load/' 
And they possess a quality which has always seemed to 
me highly admirable in a book, and a surprisingly un- 
common one: that — How shall I put it? That it should 
not be too hard to read! In fact, if I were to turn out the 
dregs of confession, I should have to admit that that is 
the kind of book I would most like to write. But it 
will please me well enough if people who have been to 
Persia fmd it possible to turn over these pages with no 
more than the usual amount of derision. And if a few 
who have not been to Persia fmd here enough of the look, 
the light, the incommunicable tang of those ancient up- 
lands, to explore the more serious literature of which I 
have spoken, to discover how far from simple is it for 
East and West to be just to one another, these loose 
sketches will not have been stitched between covers in 
vain. 

If I have not fringed the bottoms of my pages with 
notes, it has not been solely out of anxiousness not to 
enfuriate the typesetter. I must here acknowledge, how- 
ever, my great indebtedness to those whose ampler knowl- 
edge of Persia has so constantly come to the rescue of my 
own. I have borrowed right and left from Browne, 
Curzon, Le Strange, and Sykes, as well as from Mr. 
Stanley Lane-Poole, whose "Mohammedan Dynasties*' 

xiv 



CONFIDENTIAL 

is an indispensable compass to the wanderer through the 
maze of Near Eastern allusions. I have also helped 
myself without scruple from the Hakluyt Society's "Vene- 
tian Travellers in Persia," from the French translations 
of Yakut and Masudi, and from other authorities great 
and small more numerous than in a book of this kind it is 
fitting to specify. It would be unfitting, however, if I 
did not specify how much information, particularly about 
rugs, I owe to my friend Mr. A. C. Edwards of Hamadan 
and many other places, who if he chose could write a 
more competent rug book than has yet been written. 
Mr. Henry Hildebrand of Hamadan was likewise good 
enough to give me valuable hints on the same subject, 
while Dr. and Mrs. J. W. Cook of Tehran have taken the 
trouble to clear up for me various doubtful points of 
orthography. Indeed if I were to name all those in Persia 
and out from whom I have received facts and kindnesses 
without number, I would have to make a catalogue too 
long to print. But I cannot omit thanking, for their 
encouragement, help, and suggestions, Mr. Eugene F. 
Saxton, my collaborator Mr. Wilfred J. Jones, and Mr. 
and Mrs. F. Mortimer Clapp. And let me here express 
my obligations to the editors of Asia, The Bookman, and 
The Century, for permitting me to republish four chap- 
ters or parts of chapters which first saw the light in their 
magazines. 

There remains to say a word with regard to the spelling 
followed in this book. The question of rendering the 
sound of Persian words and names in English is one of 
peculiar difficulty, because at least three of the Persian 
consonants are unknown to us, while the letter a is quite 
as variable in Persian as it is in English. The trouble is 

XV 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

that those variations are not quite identical, and that one 
of them, in Persian, being oificially described as equivalent 
to the vowel sound of the English word cat, really verges 
toward the vowel sound of bet. And oificially neither 
e nor o exist in Persian. So there you have one prolific 
cause of an unending row between two camps of orthog- 
raphers. The Orientalists, on the whole, have the best 
of it; for they transliterate according to a fixed system, 
paying no attention to English phonetics and denying 
the letters e and o as the Pope did the rotation of the earth. 
Eppur si muove I answered Galileo. And my ear has too 
long been sharpened to the sound of strange tongues for 
me to be frightened by Professor Browne when he cries 
out against the barbarity of putting an ^ or an o into a 
name taken out of Arabic letters. The Turks quite in- 
controvertibly make the sounds, if they lack the letters. 
The Persians pronounce them less distinctly; yet for the 
novice to take Professor Browne's word for it that Enzeli, 
for instance, should be Anzali, is to risk straying in two 
equally false directions. Let it not be gathered that I 
am so foolish as to argue against Professor Browne's 
spelling in Professor Browne's books. It is the more 
scholarly and among Orientalists it is indispensable. 
But why should I, who am no Orientalist and who do not 
write for Orientalists, mystify my reader and set the 
heart of the compositor against me by distinguishing 
between k and q, by writing dh when I mean ^, or w when 
I mean u, and by strewing my book with dark dots and 
accents? 

I shall not. For it seems to me highly advisable to 
discourage the layman from adding to the chaos which 
already reigns in his spelling of Oriental names. I there" 

xvi 



CONFIDENTIAL 

fore choose the simpler system of the Royal Geographical 
Society. If it has its own conventions, they are at least 
more familiar and more comprehensible. The conso- 
nants are pronounced as in English, except that c, g, and s 
never encroach upon the sounds of k, j, or ^. The vowels 
are pronounced as in Italian, each separately and none 
silent. I have made one concession to the Orientalists 
in retaining the h after a final e, because nothing on earth 
will make the average Anglo-Saxon pronounce Sine, for 
example, otherwise than as the mystic consort of Cosine; 
whereas he will be obliged to make two syllables out of 
Sineh. I have further borrowed, for certain Turkish 
words, the German umlaut for a ii which does not exist 
in our language, and the French circumflex for a still more 
unpronounceable Turkish /. Otherwise I make no use 
of accents, for in Persian and Turkish the stress falls 
almost invariably on the last syllable. 

One unfortunate consequence of this system is that I 
add a new variation to an already too various name: 
that of the poet Firdeusi. This, to an enraged Oriental- 
ist, is a barbarity more shocking than Mehmed. Yet 
it comes much nearer the true sound than his Firdawsi, 
or the popularised Firdowsi, or the perhaps most com- 
mon Firdausi — unless you remember, which you won't 
unless you know Persian, that that ^ is a cattish a verg- 
ing on e. The Italian eu hits it almost exactly. But I 
must end by confessing that consistency is too rare a jewel 
for me always to keep hold of it. If I say Enzeli, as 
Professor Browne very aptly points out, I should also 
say Tebriz and Hemedan. Well, I don't! For usage 
seems to have taken the matter out of my hands — as in 
other cases have ignorance or the idiosyncrasies of the 

xvii 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

English tongue. And Tehran? As to that, it is high time 
English-speaking people stopped using a French spelling 
for a name which really has only two syllables. After all, 
they will not be so upset as if I had followed Professor 
Browne and said Tihran! 



xvni 



PERSIAN 
MINIATURES 




CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

Here thou at greater Ease than hee 

Mayst behold what hee did see; 

Thou participates his Gaines, 

But hee alone reserves the Paines. 

Hee traded not with Luker sotted. 

Hee went for Knowledge and hee got it. 

Then thank the Author: Thanks is light, 

Who hath presented to thy Sight 

Seas, Lands, Men, Beasts, Fishes, and Birds, 

The rarest that the World affoords. 

The Lord Fayrfax, Baron of Cameron, on Sir Thomas Herbert, 
his: 

SOME YEERES TRAVELS INTO DIVERS PARTS OF ASIA AND AFFRIQUE 

WE HAD formed the habit, during a week 
of leisurely Black Sea travel, of waking 
up every morning off a town of low red 
roofs and slim white minarets, set under 
a high green coast. Batum also sat under a high green 
coast — if so much higher than usual as to be tipped with 
snow. But instead of anchoring offshore and bargaining 

3 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

with the crews of tall-prowed Turkish boats, we tied 
up to a quay and walked ashore with no more ado than a 
brief session with my lords of the customs and the pass- 
port .bureau. And more conspicuous than any minaret 
were the syringe domes of a Russian cathedral. Whereby 
it appeared that something had happened in Batum since 
it stopped being a Turkish town in 1878. 

That fact was still more apparent when I stepped into 
a true Russian droshky, driven by a true Russian coach- 
man — a kind of centaur so at one with his box that no 
human being could tell where coachman stopped and 
carriage began — and rattled away over true Russian 
cobblestones. I suspect, however, that if I had had the 
courage to scratch that coachman I would have found a 
Georgian, if not a Tartar. In the Caucasus whenever 
they don't know what to call a man they call him a Geor- 
gian. That they are not always right I once or twice 
proved by asking the man himself and finding out that 
he was what I thought; namely, a Laz. Those quick- 
tempered people are almost as common in Batum as 
they are in Trebizond, and they look enough like Geor- 
gians to be their cousins. They all wear the same top 
boots, the same slack breeches, the same short jackets, 
and the same long-flapped hoods with a tassel at the 
point — which serve them equally for turbans, mufflers, 
or capes. The big black policemen of Batum dress like 
that, being Georgians. I wondered if the house boys of 
the Hotel de France were, too. They wore black Russian 
blouses and spoke no known language. But there are 
still plenty of Turks left in the town, as I discovered while 
prowling around before it was time to take my evening 
train. 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

They say that a famous bridge over the Golden Horn 
is a good place from which to admire the nations of the 
earth. It struck me that the railway station of Batum 
might be a better one, when I went there in charge of an 
Armenian porter from the hotel. A good many among 
the crowd that packed the waiting rooms were his own 
fellow countrymen. They were darker and fierier looking 
people than the Armenians I had seen before, with an 
odd look of the Latin Quarter about many of them. One 
group of young men in broad-brimmed hats, string ties, 
and peg-top trousers stood tightly under an electric light 
around an intense young woman with a slight moustache, 
who read aloud to them out of a brand new book of 
poetry. How do I know? It rhymed! But they were 
there, my porter told me, to do honour to the memory of 
a certain Armenian philanthropist who had recently 
died in Constantinople and whose body, having been 
brought to Batum on my ship, was about to be taken to 
Tiflis by my train, thence to be sent for burial to the great 
Armenian monastery of Echmiadzin. Sure enough, at 
the end of the train stood a freight car which had been 
turned into a chapelle ardente, with flowers and candles 
standing around a black catafalque. However, Armen- 
ians were but a fraction of that polyglot company, among 
whom were Greeks, Turks, Tartars, the inevitable Geor- 
gian, and the equally inevitable Russian, together with 
such exotic specimens as the tall Swede who had travelled 
most of the length of the Black Sea in my steamer chair, 
the fat German who had left no stone unturned to find 
out where I was going and why, and an English agent 
of the American Licorice Company. 

The train in which my Armenian presently deposited 

5 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

me was the St. Petersburg express; for to get from Batum 
to St. Petersburg by rail — Petrograd had still to be in- 
vented — you must cross the Transcaucasus to Derbend 
and then come back to Rostov on the north side of the 
mountains, before striking up country for Moscow. It 
was the usual roomy Russian train, thanks to the broader 
gauge of the Russian rails, and my compartment was the 
roomier because the seats in it were numbered. What 
interested me first, however, was the view. That was 
striking enough in the moonlight as we ran along the edge 
of the sea toward the ghostly heights of the Caucasus. 
Then I began to be interested in my fellow travellers. 
They turned out to be all Greeks and all of one party, on 
their way to a wedding in Tiflis. This information was 
vouchsafed to me by the bride herself, in an English 
much more creditable than my flimsy Romaic. As for 
her short, fat, ugly, gay mamma, she was more fluent in 
Italian and Turkish. There were also two younger 
daughters, one plumper and one more pinched, dressed 
as exactly alike as two magpies, an older married daughter 
with a diamond, a dumpy, talkative person who had the 
air of a poor relation, and a rakish husband or two. They 
all seemed to be as much at home in Russian as they were 
in Greek, and between the odds and ends of other lan- 
guages which we possessed in common we got along 
famously. 

The gay mamma, to whom I would have proposed 
before the night was out if I had been quite sure that 
neither of the rakish husbands belonged to her, finally 
announced that she was tired of doing all the talking 
and that we must take turns telling stories, propounding 
enigmas, or otherwise helping to pass the time. She 

6 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

opened this Decameron with a Turkish folk tale which 
I had heard before but never with so much verve and 
mimicry. One of the rakish husbands came next. He 
tried to get out of his turn by declaring that none of the 
stories he knew could be told in such company. The 
ladies all cried out that he should try them and see. 
Whereupon he compromised with a string of Turkish 
proverbs. The bride followed, and she told a Caucasian 
version of the story of Cupid and Psyche, about a fairy 
who was a fairy by night and a flower in the daytime — 
to the infinite despair of her lover. The fairy told him, 
however, that if in the morning he could distinguish her 
from the other flowers in the garden, and carry her away 
in his hand, he would break the enchantment and she 
would always be his. So in the morning he went into 
the garden and he broke the enchantment, because of all 
the flowers the one he picked was the only one that had 
no dew on its petals. . . . 

In the meantime my knees knocked together; for tell- 
ing stories is not my strong point, and least of all in 
strange tongues. But in the end I was saved by the gay 
mamma, who could not stop talking long enough for the 
turn to go the entire round. She then proposed that we 
do something which all could do together. She therefore 
lifted up a far from disagreeable voice in song, and the 
others joined in — I wondering what they would make of 
it next door in the Damencoiipe, As it transpired, most 
of us belonged in the Damencoupe, though the bride had 
sung in her marriage morn before she retired thither 
with her younger sisters and her poor relation. After 
that the rest of us arranged ourselves for the night. To 
that end we turned up the backs of the seats, as may be 

7 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

done in a Russian car even when it is not a sleeper, and one 
of the rakish husbands and I stretched out on the upper 
storey, while the gay mamma and her married daughter 
at last dropped into silence below. The only discomfort 
about it was that the double windows were hermetically 
sealed for winter. 

In the simplicity of my heart I had imagined that one 
travelled most of the way from Batum to Baku in roman- 
tic mountain passes. To my great surprise and dis- 
appointment, accordingly, I discovered in the morning 
that no mountains were near us. They had receded 
during the night to either side of a wide bare brown 
valley with water in the bottom of it. They did, how- 
ever, draw together a little as we went on, and towers 
decorated the tops of hills. Sheepskin caps, further- 
more, began more thickly to decorate the roads beside 
the track, where I also noticed sheets of ice, and about 
half-past eight we stopped at Tiflis. This for me was 
doubly an hour of doom, for not only did I pine to look 
at Tiflis but I died to accept the gay mamma's invitation 
and go to the wedding with my lively friends. The 
trouble was that I had other friends to meet in Baku, 
and a Caspian boat to catch. So I had time only to be 
introduced to a smart Greek bridegroom, to eat an ex- 
cellent breakfast, to stare all too briefly at the astounding 
people in the station, and to admire Tiflis from the com- 
partment window as we rumbled away from it, hanging 
on either lip of a deep gorge with a cog railway climbing 
a mountain behind. After that the bare brown valley 
widened again, giving view of distant snow mountains 
on the right and more distant snow mountains on the 
left. In front of the latter ran a line of low hills, fluted 

8 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

with sharp erosions, that looked sometimes like mud vol- 
canoes and sometimes like an old shore. 

I was not, I must confess, too upset at being torn from 
my Greek friends to take notice of my new compan- 
ions. Chief among them were a Russian matron, much 
more serious than the gay mamma whose corner she took, 
and her big bold black daughter with a bang, with an 
eye that looked as if it might have been drawn by Mr. 
Maurice Ketten, and with a willingness to cultivate 
casual masculine acquaintance. That eye filled me with 
mingled emotions, for while it alarmed me a little it 
was the first Russian eye into which I had gazed for more 
than two seconds since I had set foot in the Caucasus. 
And for Russian eyes, as for many other things Russian, 
I have always had a weakness. I hardly know why. 
Perhaps because I went to school with some boys from 
Taganrog, at the mouth of the Don. Perhaps because a 
railway clerk in St. Petersburg once insisted, with con- 
siderable asperity, in spite of my feeble protests, on giv- 
ing me change for ten pounds out of a five pound note, 
to the no small advantage of my depleted exchequer. 
Perhaps because an old lady who might have taught me 
far more than she did set me reading Tolstoy and 
Turgeni^v long before I knew anything about Hardy 
and Meredith, or Howells and James, or even Jack 
London and Richard Harding Davis. With the unhappy 
result that when in time I came to the latter, and 
particularly the last two, I failed to derive quite the 
satisfaction I might have felt if I had happened on them 
first. 

These things, of course, are largely a matter of the 
personal equation, and the world is luckily big enough 

9 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

for Tolstoy and Richard Harding Davis to sit on the same 
shelf. I find, though, that on my shelf the Russians have 
a curious, if a perfectly unconscious, way of putting out 
everybody else's eye. They are so human. They are 
so simple. They see around so many corners. Nothing 
frightens them; but they are not prudish about it, as an 
Anglo-Saxon has a tendency to be, or cynical about it, as a 
Latin has a tendency to be. Neither are they senti- 
mental about it. And behind it all there is a strange 
trouble, which somehow contrives not to be childish even 
in the face of an American Glad Book. Dostoievsky 
rather puts his fmger on it, in "The Brothers Karama- 
zov" : '' It is different for other people; but we in our green 
youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all. 
That's what we care about. Young Russia is talking 
about nothing but the eternal questions now." And 
the things that come into their heads ! Do you remember 
Svidrigailov, in "Crime and Punishment"? 

"'I don't believe in a future life,' said Raskolnikov. 

"Svidrigailov sat lost in thought. 

" * And what if there are only spiders there, or something 
like that?' he said suddenly. 

" ' He is a madman,' thought Raskolnikov." 

And so, perhaps, do you. But only a Russian would 
think of that. And only a Russian could have written 
that tremendous scene between Svidrigailov and Sonia, 
surely the most shaking of its kind in all literature, when 
he gets her into that garret and then lets her go. 

I regarded the bold black eye of the young lady with a 
bang and asked myself, with some misgiving, if it were 
seeking the solution of eternal questions. I went into 
the corridor to think about it. There I found myself 

lO 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

beside another lady, much older, who presently asked 
me something in Russian. She looked so much like an 
English or New English woman of the kind I most like 
that I didn't answer, as I often do under such circum- 
stances, that I hadn't a match and didn't know what 
time it was. I told her instead that I didn't know Rus- 
sian. And before I knew it she was telling me that she 
was going to Petersburg for the winter but that she lived 
in Batum, or just outside of it, where she had a house and 
a garden in sight of the Black Sea. In her hand she held 
some violets from that garden and she offered me a few 
of them, telling me how quickly everything grew there, 
even subtropical things, under the high white wall of 
the Caucasus. Anarchists, she said, preach the destruc- 
tion of property; but it is an instinct of man to have 
something of his own. When one is young one can 
travel, and be alone. Later one wishes a home, and a 
garden. Her garden she had planted herself, from the 
beginning. It was like her child, now that her chil- 
dren were grown up. She and her husband had done every- 
thing by degrees, as they could save money from their 
pay. Her husband was a retired civil servant of some 
kind. She didn't go into particulars and 1 didn't ask 
for them: but she told me that they had lived in many 
parts of Russia, adding that she had been very fortunate. 
She had married young a young and handsome husband, 
with whom she had always been happy. Her children, 
too, had never caused them any unhappiness — except one 
daughter, who died in the flower of her age. At first, 
she said, she took it for granted. Later, however, when 
she saw how many marriages of her friends were unhappy, 
she discovered how fortunate she had been. Her chil- 

1 1 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

dren, of course, she missed, now that they were married 
and living in homes of their own. But there had been 
among them none of the disasters of which one was con- 
stantly hearing. And there was her garden. . . 

She said it all quite simply, without polite prelimi- 
naries, just as if she had walked out of Turgeniev. And 
she said many other things which I have often thought 
of since. "My country makes me sad," she said — ''so 
large, so varied, and he who should govern not strong 
enough, and those who do govern thinking only of their 
pockets. There is too much unhappiness. There will be 
another uprising." That was in November, 191 3. "Peo- 
ple cannot speak or think. Those who do, have to leave 
the country. Tolstoy was the only one who stayed, and 
whom they dared not touch." The mention of that name 
brought up other names. I told her that I had been in 
New York when Gorky went there — in 1905, was it — 
and that I had not been proud of the zeal which my 
fellow countrymen showed in casting the first stone at 
him. To my surprise she rather took their part against 
me, although she considered Gorky the greatest of living 
Russian writers. She surprised me, too, by saying that 
he had deprecated the reading of Dostoievsky by the 
younger generation — though perhaps I misunderstood 
her. Of Artsibashev's "Sanin" she cried out that it was 
a dreadful book. She told me I should rather read 
Korolenko, and the plays of Ostrovsky. When I told her 
what an impression "Evgeni Onegin" made upon me, 
years ago, in Moscow, and what new things had been 
revealed to me when Safonov came to New York to 
conduct the Philharmonic Orchestra, she was evidently 
pleased. "Yes," she said; "I love Chopin, Schumann, 

12 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

Beethoven. But our Russians have something they have 
not — a sadness, an understanding.'* 

All this time we had been standing up in the corridor. 
My old lady out of Turgeniev finally invited me to sit 
down in her compartment — which happened to be the 
Damencoupe. And there I walked into Dostoievsky. 
For the back of one of the seats was turned up, and on 
that upper shelf another lady was lying, of whom I hesi- 
tatingly asked if I did not disturb her. She had a strange 
thin face and a quantity of pale hair piled loosely on top 
of her head. "Monsieur does not disturb me," she re- 
plied. "He is a stranger, and therefore not a bore — yet. 
Afterwards we shall see!'' She said it in a deep, hoarse 
voice, and in a French much more fluent than the old 
lady's or mine, but with an extraordinary accent. At 
first she only listened to the two of us who sat below, 
supplying every now and then the word we groped for. 
Then she began to talk, too, asking me what I was up to 
and telling me about the barbarous Caucasus, the mag- 
nificent scenery, the pass from Tiflis to Vladikavkaz. She 
was from Tiflis herself. " I would have liked to travel, 
too," she remarked. "But now — it is finished. I go 
to Petersburg, to die." She said it without heroics, 
without sentimentality, in her deep, hoarse voice, her ter- 
rific accent, stroking her pale hair on her upper shelf. 
And she and the older lady presently fell afoul of each 
other over the Russian peasant. The lady from Tiflis 
insisted that he was lazy, stupid, drunken, the curse and 
despair of the country. The lady from Batum took up 
his defence, saying that she had spent all her life with 
the muzhik and thought the world of him. If he was 
drunken it was largely the fault of the Government, who 

13 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

forced vodka upon villages even when they didn't want 
it, for the sake of the revenue. Ignorant he certainly 
was, that muihih; but what chance had he had? And 
she went on to tell with what difficulty she had obtained 
permission from Petersburg to open a night school for 
peasants in one of the cities of Little Russia where her 
husband was then stationed. More peasants had come 
than there was room for, and soldiers, too — till her hus- 
band was suddenly transferred to another province. 
For the rest, the muihik merely followed the example 
set him by his betters, in this generation without restraint, 
without faith, without God. As for her, she cared noth- 
ing for pictures and confessions, she said: only the Gos- 
pel, and to hold something sacred. . . The lady 
from Tiflis listened from her upper shelf, her eyes strangely 
intense in her thin face. "Yes,'' she finally uttered in 

that hoarse voice: "To hold something sacred " And 

she turned her face to the wall. 

It suddenly came over me in the silence that followed, 
as I stared at that pile of pale hair, that there was some- 
thing more terrific than an accent on that upper shelf. 
Yet the eyes that looked at the wall were not terrified. 
And who knew what they saw? They saw, at any rate, 
that the stranger was after all a bore. So I went back, 
awkwardly enough, to my own compartment. The 
matron and her big black daughter were still there. They 
at once made it known to me that they were not seeking 
the solution of eternal questions, and I found, after my 
visit in the Damencoupe, that I would not lay it up against 
them. The only thing I laid up against them was that 
they looked a little too arch over my violets, and asked 
me whether the lady from Batum were a governess or a 

14 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

school teacher. They had evidently been listening. I 
assured them that the lady from Batum was, on the 
contrary, the wife of a Governor General. It may not 
have been true, but it impressed them considerably. 
As for them, they were the wife and daughter of a Colonel, 
now stationed at Vladikavkaz. Was I going to Vladi- 
kavkaz? In the summer it was delicious, when the beau 
monde of Tiflis and Moscow and Petersburg came to the 
resorts on the north side of the mountain. In the winter, 
however, it was a little sad. Then the daughter began 
to prepare me for Vladikavkaz by giving me a Russian 
lesson, giggling in spite of herself at my dreadful pronun- 
ciation. But presently a tall lieutenant made his ap- 
pearance, and the Russian lesson came to an abrupt end. 
I did not mind, for I caught sight through the window 
of a rose-coloured lake. By this time we had come much 
nearer the mountains of Prometheus, whose white heights 
wore a delicate flush. Far away on the other side a row 
of silver peaks ran sharp against a painted sky. Were 
they Persian peaks, I wondered? If they were, the sight 
of them gave me no such thrill as should be felt by the 
right-minded pilgrim when first he beholds the distant 
goal of his desire. Even the summits of Prometheus, 
whose flush paled imperceptibly and took on a phos- 
phorescent glimmer, failed to do what they should for a 
man who had sat in the theatre of Dionysus. Instead 
of thinking about the Greek Titan and his rock and his 
vulture, 1 found myself thinking about the Russian lady 
from Tiflis, lying on her upper shelf in the Damencoup^ 
with her wide-open eyes to the wall. Also, I grew rather 
sleepy. The train rumbled on. The country outside 
turned dimmer, flatter, fantastically blanched. Could 

15 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

that be sand? Like enough. For all of a sudden I caught, 
through the corridor window, the glint of wide water 
under a climbing moon. The Caspian Sea! I did the 
Caspian Sea the honour to wake up and go into the corri- 
dor. I then discovered to my astonishment that the 
Caspian Sea, for all its moon of Turkestan, looked exactly 
like Lake Champlain under the moon of Vermont — until I 
spied on the shore a vagrant camel, the silhouette of him 
dark and exotic as the East against a rippling glamour. He 
saved the day for the Caspian, did that camel! Then 
ruddier and more melodramatic fires began to flare on 
the horizon, to the north. And at last, latish in the 
evening, I said good-bye to my Russian friends and got 
off at Baku. 

Those fires and that camel are the symbols and epi- 
tome of Baku. Baku is, if you like, a jumping-off place. 
It is, at any rate, the place from which you jump off to 
Tehran or Samarkand. But it had to me an almost 
American air — as it were a Pittsburgh dipped in Asia. 
That is perhaps because Baku flames and belches, too, if 
after a manner of its own, and without the diabolic 
beauty with which nature and man have conspired to 
endow the true Pittsburgh. Baku sits on lower and more 
barren hills, regarding a greasy gray-green sea that never 
again looked to me so picturesque as when I first beheld 
it in the moonlight behind a camel. The houses of Baku, 
furthermore, make no attempt to scrape the sky, al- 
though they look solider than those of Pittsburgh. They 
are astonishingly new, however, a great many of them. 
And Baku bustles in a way that is quite upsetting to 
one's theories of that part of the world. What gives this 
process its particular colour is that Baku is, as a matter 

i6 



/ 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

of fact, a fairly venerable town. Some twenty years 
before America was discovered a Venetian ambassador 
by the name of Giosafat Barbaro passed that way and 
wrote, or his quaint EngHsh translator did, of *'a citie 
called Bachu, whereof the sea of Bachu taketh its name, 
neere vnto which citie there is a mountaigne that casteth 
foorth blacke oyle, stynkeng horryblye, which they, 
nevertheles, vse for furnissheng of their lightes, and 
for the anoynteng of their camells twies a yere." And 
all honest tourists, of whom I regret to confess I am not 
one, piously visit in Baku a place where the fires of Zoro- 
aster have burned these two or three thousand years. 

The remnants of this more ancient Baku are to be seen 
in certain higher parts of the town, where a castle stands 
in light stone, rather like the tufa of Naples, adorned 
with Persian lions and inscriptions. Beyond it stretches 
a quarter which went far toward consoling me for the 
discovery that I might after all have stopped off in Tiflis, 
inhabited as it is by fragments of more strange races 
than I know anything about. The races of Pittsburgh 
are no doubt as varied, but they all dress and look more 
or less alike, whereas in Baku many thousands of 
good people still dress as their ancestors did before 
America was discovered. As I sat one evening in my 
French Hotel d' Europe, eating a Russian dinner, I over- 
heard a group of English engineers discussing the merits 
of oysters. They warmed my patriotic heart not a little 
by the favour with which they mentioned Blue Points 
and Lynn Havens, though they ended by giving the palm 
to a certain unpronounceable mollusc of Rio de Janeiro. 
Later I came to know one of those engineers very well, 
and he told me that in spite of Giosafat Barbaro and 

17 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

the Zoroastrians, Baku did not begin to bustle until 
about thirty years ago. Then it was a ruinous village 
of Tartars and Persians, together with other ingredients 
of the usual Caucasian pie. One day a Russian oificer 
took it into his head to buy some land there for a farm. 
Having bought his farm, he presently found out that 
nothing would grow on it. Wherever he ploughed, more- 
over, a disgusting black liquid would ooze out of the 
earth, and nothing could drain it away. Of these mat- 
ters he made bitter complaint to an Armenian, offering 
him the farm for an extremely small sum. The Ar- 
menian kindly consented to take the place off his hands, 
having a suspicion that that black liquid would bear 
looking into. That suspicion made the Armenian a mil- 
lionaire. The Tartars and Persians who owned most of 
the rest of Baku had suspicions of another kind when 
other people tried to buy their land, and for a long time 
they wouldn't sell. In the end, however, they became 
millionaires, too. They couldn't help themselves. And 
that is why Baku is so amusing. The Russian and Ar- 
menian millionaires go away, like the millionaires of 
Pittsburgh. The Tartar and the Persian millionaires 
don't, having no idea what on earth to do with their 
money. So they roll around Baku in such automobiles 
as these mortal eyes have ne'er beheld, painted the most 
recondite colours, gilded, jewelled, bearing passengers 
with sleepy or with boiling black eyes as the case may be, 
with all the noses of Asia, with beards that as often as not 
are dyed scarlet with henna, with such headdresses as 
never were seen on sea or land. They also go to the 
movies, marvelling over the manners and morals of 
Europe and the New World as exhibited to them in the 

i8 



CAUCASIAN PROLOGUE 

films of Pathe and Charlie Chaplin. And for them are 
the shops of Baku stuffed with every gimcrack that the 
heart of man can desire — provided he wants to pay for it 
ten times as much as he would in Pittsburgh. 

It was the middle of November when I arrived in Baku, 
but it was still warm enough for the band to play in the 
park. That park is the quintessence of Baku. It is 
not a very leafy park, even in midsummer, for nothing 
will grow in it except in tubs of earth imported at vast 
expense. Neither is there anything wherewith to water 
those tubs except by distilling, again at vast expense, the 
greasy gray-green mixture of salt and oil that fills the 
shallow basin of the Caspian Sea. Nevertheless, it is a 
very agreeable park, laid out at length on the edge of 
the water. There are trim sanded paths, there are showy 
casinoes, there are boat-houses and bathing-houses, there 
are above all Russian caps set on more kinds of heads 
than I can begin to catalogue. There are also hats, and 
turbans, and woolly kalpaks, together with coats of many 
colours, and rows of cartridge cases, and wonderful dag- 
gers, and more wonderful ladies, attached or otherwise, 
and heaven knows what. And as they move to and fro 
on the trim sanded paths, or lounge on the wooden benches 
a band better than ever I heard in New York plays Verdi 
and Wagner and Bizet and Glinka and Chaikovsky. 
And at last, there on the edge of nowhere, the electric 
lights come out with a pop, and far away, over the dark 
Caspian, a slow moon climbs out of Samarkand. 



19 




II 



ANABASIS 

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go 

Always a little further: it may he 

Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, 

Across that angry or that glimmering sea. . . . 

J. E. Flecker: the golden journey to Samarkand 



I 

FROM the deck of the unsteady little paddle- 
wheel steamer that churned out of the bay 
toward a low red moon we looked our last on 
Baku — a receding crescent of lights accented 
at one end by a dark hill and at the other by the angry 
glare of the oil fields. Then we went down to a porten- 
tous Russian dinner. At the head of the table sat a grave 
Lettish captain who at once made me conscious of all I 

20 



ANABASIS 

had missed by never embarking on the Caspian before. 
Beside him sat the tall Swede who on the Black Sea had 
formed such a predilection for my steamer chair, and 
who now looked at me through his monocle with immense 
disdain. It appeared that he was going to Persia to be 
an officer of gendarmes. Opposite him sat a Belgian 
customs inspector and his family, also bound to the same 
country for the first time. Then there were two hand- 
some Russian officers, two frock-coated Persian Khans 
with black pill boxes on their heads, and our three 
selves, who came from yet more distant portions of 
the earth. It was polyglot, it was pleasant, and after 
dinner Madame I'lnspectrice sang us some charming 
French songs. I shall not try to pretend that I was 
too world-weary to be taken in by it all. As a matter 
of fact, I was delighted. But I was also able to perceive 
that we might just as well have been on the Black Sea or 
the Baltic. 

The next morning, however, the Caspian really looked 
as the Caspian might be expected to look. It was the 
same greasy greeny gray, and birds that should fly 
over no true sea fluttered about the chopping side-wheeler 
or even lighted on it, playing hide and seek with belted 
Russian soldiers who tried to catch them in their hands. 
We passed a full-rigged ship, too, stubby and black, with 
a square counter that came out of no yard of born ship- 
wrights. It was such a ship as Master Anthony Jenkin- 
son might have set sail in from the mouth of the Volga up- 
on the disastrous affairs of the Muscovy Company. Then, 
about noon, the bank of gray in the south began to resolve 
itself into a rampart of cloud that grew taller and solider 
as we chugged toward it. And at last a semicircle of trees 

21 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

pricked the edge of the sea, making the rampart behind 
it higher and more tenebrous than ever. 

"What is that?" cried the Belgian lady of the captain, 
who paced back and forth near us, grave as ever and a 
little grim. 

" It is Persia,'' he answered — like that, as if Persia were 
an every-day affair. 

''And when shall we smell the roses, and hear the night- 
ingales?" pursued his pretty passenger. 

The captain waited a discreet moment before answering 
cryptically: 

"Madame perhaps forgets that it is November. We 
shall arrive in an hour or two." 

He pursued his walk, leaving me to consider the grim 
case of the Belgian lady. Of Persia I knew no more 
than she, but of certain regions contiguous thereto I 
knew a little, and I trembled for her. What I really 
found myself considering, however, was that rampart of 
growing grimness that towered across the south, unbe- 
lievably high, increasingly seamed and patched with 
shadows of green and white. Such a coast as that, 
at any rate, I had never seen in my life. The prickly 
trees on the horizon grew taller and darker, they some- 
how established a connection with the stupendous moun- 
tain chain behind them, and at last we slid between 
two long wooden breakwaters into the still lagoon of 
Enzeli. 

At sight of it that unhappy Belgian lady burst into tears. 
I knew much better than if she had told me that she had 
seen precious things in museums, that she had read an 
expurgated edition of the "Arabian Nights," and that she 
expected palaces of porcelain set among roses and night- 

22 



ANABASIS 

ingales, with no doubt a palm or two in the background, 
a camel in the foreground, and who knew what else? 
Perhaps an elephant, or an ibis standing on one leg in a 
pool of lotuses. It may be that if I had been booked 
to live in Enzeli, like Madame I'lnspectrice, I might have 
burst into tears, too. As it was I found the lagoon of 
Enzeli a highly pleasing place, with its gray sheen framed 
in trees with its quaint, unpainted row-boats turned 
up at either end; with its junk-like ships moored along the 
low shore, and its encircling houses of weathered wood, 
rather scattered, of which the most pleasing had steep 
thatched roofs. 

Leaving the larger town of Enzeli at the right, we sidled 
up to the opposite edge of Kazian. There we were im- 
mediately boarded by a swarm of bare-legged ruffians 
who chattered, to my immense astonishment, in a lan- 
guage perfectly unintelligible to me. They drawled or 
whined, rather, in a way that reminded one a little of 
Naples; but there was nothing else familiar about them 
except the leather humps on their backs, whereon they pro- 
ceeded to balance our trunks. Some of them looked as if 
they might be kin to the Tartar porters of Baku. The 
flapping clothes of these had once been white, and they 
wore dusky skull caps of the same material. Others 
covered their hair with a kind of sheepskin muff, sewed 
up at one end. But the rags of most of them were dull 
blue or green or russet, girdled at the waist and skirted 
to the knee, and they contrived to keep on their heads 
an astounding erection of black or brown felt, shaped 
rather like a boiled auk's egg with the small end chipped 
off. 

These picturesque individuals piloted us and our lug- 

23 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

gage to a big archway opening into an interior court of 
the custom house. True, we had inadvertently thrown 
our checks overboard; but on the Caspian what is a little 
matter of receipts, between friends? In that archway 
our passports were duly examined by a superb personage 
in a long coat and a black pillbox adorned with the lion 
and sun of his country in brass. If he had followed the 
dictates of his own dark heart he would doubtless have 
looked into our trunks, for I could see he was dying to 
know what on earth we had in so many bags, boxes, 
bundles, and other receptacles beginning with h and other 
letters. But since we were the travelling companions 
of a Belgian customs inspector, and since my friends were 
well known to his own Belgian chief, we were passed 
through with no more than an interval for me to admire 
the passengers who sauntered off the Russian boat with 
gay saddlebags and painted wooden trunks. There were 
also two distinguished looking English ladies whom I had 
not seen on board. One of them sat like a symbol of 
her empire on a stout metal box so appropriately labelled, 
in big white letters, IRONSIDES, that I very nearly 
smiled at her like a bounder. Then we climbed a flight 
of stairs to thank the Belgian customs inspector for his 
courtesy. We found him in a cosy salon full of rugs and 
Persian bric-a-brac and talk about aniline dyes and the 
export duty charged on carpets containing them. This 
gentleman also had a pretty French-speaking wife, upon 
whose sympathetic shoulder our own Belgian lady 
was drying the tears of her disillusionment. And so, 
separating ourselves from all but our lightest luggage, we 
hopped into a funny little victoria and drove away to 
Resht. 

24 



ANABASIS 



II 



Resht is an example of the unwillingness of the East to 
change its habits. Resht is an important city, capital 
of the rich seaboard province of Gilan. Yet because the 
sea has never meant anything to a Persian, and because 
the caravan roads naturally take the inner side of the 
lagoon, Resht grew up out of sight of the Caspian. In 
the good old times those who insisted on doing so took 
ship to Enzeli, just as you do now. But at Enzeli they 
embarked in one of those turned-up boats, sailed across 
the lagoon, and rowed or got themselves towed up a 
river to within a mile or two of Resht, where — after pay- 
ing all the gold of Ophir to get themselves transported into 
the town itself — they really began their journey inland. 
Now you still begin your real journey at Resht. In the 
meantime, however, the Russians have built a macadam- 
ised road around the lagoon. 

Beside it ran a pair of Decauville rails, which at that 
time shared with a short line running between Tehran 
and one of its suburbs the honour of being the only rail- 
road in Persia. And Persia is bigger than Alaska, about 
as big as California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas 
put together — or France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. 
But for my own part I was enchanted to be in a car- 
riage rather than in a compartment. That Decauville 
track, moreover, and one or two auto-busses that 
whizzed past us, interested me infinitely less than the flat 
country through which we drove at the end of a mild 
gray afternoon. It grew woodier as we left the sand 
dunes and the Caspian behind us. A cormorant or two 
flapped away across marshes of plumy reeds. Crows 

25 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

flew up from bare rice fields crisscrossed by causeways of 
earth. Still streams wound away among poplar trees 
that had not yet lost their last leaf. Under them thatched 
wooden shanties stood on stilts. And we passed any 
number of woolly little black cows with humps on their 
shoulders, just as you see in pictures of India. Those 
cows gave me only the first of many subsequent hints 
that if Persia reaches out one hand to Turkey, she stretches 
the other .toward that land so much older and more re- 
mote. 

On the farther side of a wooden bridge, under which a 
turned-up boat paddled ofi" between reeds and rice fields, 
our driver proceeded to initiate me into the most deep- 
rooted of the customs of Persia by stopping at a half-way 
tea house. Picture not to yourself, however, any lady- 
like establishment of linen-covered tables, trim waitresses, 
and Dresden china. This was a thatched house on 
stilts, like the others along the road, open in front to the 
world and presenting to our admiration a row of legs more 
often bare than not, a line of auks' eggs — one or two 
with a neat round indentation in the top — and a suc- 
cession of long black pipes, together with splashes of 
russet, green, and blue, a casual glitter, of brass, and a 
quantity of what might have been whiskey glasses, con- 
taining about three fingers each of nothing stronger than 
tea. They also contained plenty of sugar, as I presently 
had occasion to find out, and perhaps a sliver of lemon. 

But milk Heavens, no! The Sahib — or the Sah'b, 

as the coachman and everybody else in Persia seemed to 
call the head of our small party — told me that those 
black pipes were more than likely to contain opium. 
And he went on to narrate enlivening tales of what some- 

26 



ANABASIS 

times happens to carriages in Persia when their drivers 
smoke too long at a tea house. 

Our driver happily did not, and at nightfall we drew up 
in front of the chapar khaneh, the post-house, of Resht. 
Upon this post-house, its immense eaves, its balconies 
hanging on nothing, and its archway leading into a dark 
inner court, I gazed with an intense, a pathetic, interest — 
such is the power upon certain innocent spirits of things 
seen for the first time. I had, indeed, seen a post-house 
before, but never one that had the dignity of a national 
institution or of a lineage that stretched back unbroken 
to the time of Achsemenian kings. The Sah'b in the 
meantime engaged himself in a long and somewhat 
heated colloquy with the naih, the deputy road master to be 
found in every post-house. During this unintelligible 
conversation there continually popped up the esoteric 
word asp. Now an asp never reminds me of anything 
but Cleopatra and her monument, to say nothing of her 
woman Charmian; and what on earth had those good 
Egyptians to do with a journey into Persia? It ap- 
peared that they had a good deal; for an asp, pronounced 
almost exactly as in English, is in Persian a horse. 
Moreover, the natb swore he could give us none 
till he had sent the Russian mail on to Tehran. And 
it was very heavy to-night. Apparently, therefore, 
there was nothing for us to do but to climb the open 
wooden stair leading from the court to the upper gallery 
of the chapar khaneh, to enter a room furnished with two 
beds, a long table, a quantity of rugs, and a balcony, to 
eat such meats as the naih had at his disposal, and to 
wait until horses were sent back from the next station up 
the road. 

27 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

There might, indeed, be something else to do, thought 
I in my secret heart — even after the Sah'b assured me 
there was nothing to see in Resht. Perhaps! But what 
if your theory of hfe happens to be that there is something 
to see everywhere? What if you have just set foot, for 
the first time in your life, on the virgin soil of Persia? 
What if you fmd yourself in an inn at the edge of a Per- 
sian town, which lies somewhere beyond the balcony in 
the dark, which fills the night with strange sounds and 
smells and possibilities, and which you would mightily 
like to prowl in, to say nothing of spending a night in 
and looking at by daylight? What, however, could I 
do? I had cheated the Sah'b and the Khanum, by a too 
literal reading of a friendly invitation, out of a Golden 
Journey to Samarkand. It was not for me, therefore, to 
hinder them from hurrying as fast as asps would carry 
them to a brand-new house in Hamadan. And, after all, 
there were enough characteristic things to see in my 
first chapar khaneh. One of them was the exchanging of 
our handy Russian money for a sack of Persian two-kran 
pieces, worth some eighteen cents each, which with the 
cartwheel tomans that it needs ten krans to make, and the 
tiny shahis of which there are twenty in a kran, constitute 
the sole coin of the realm. Then came the affair of buy- 
ing our " ticket '* for Hamadan. It cost, for the use of 
one carriage and the four horses necessary to draw it 
250 miles, together with the incidental toll charges of 
the Russian road, not far from ^100. Evidently one 
would have to think twice before travelling in Persia, 
thought I, who dreamed of Isfahan and Shiraz. True, 
three persons, or as many more as can squeeze into one 
carriage, pay no more than one; but even so it struck me 

28 



ANABASIS 

that in some other parts of the world ^33 might take one 
considerably farther than 250 miles. However, we pro- 
ceeded to follow a lantern into a huge shadowy stable at the 
back of the court where we picked out our carriage for the 
journey. It was a big rattlety-bang landau, patched and 
scratched beyond belief, that might almost have come 
down itself from Achaemenian times. I thought so all the 
more when the Sah'b told me that the contractor who ran 
this particular post road for the Russians was a Parsee. 

The night began to look darker than ever when the 
Russian consul telephoned to the naih for another team of 
horses — though handful was what he really said. He 
telephoned, mind you! In Persia! The natb telephoned 
back, at the top of his voice, that the only handful of asps 
he had was engaged. The Russian consul, not suspecting 
that a newly arrived fellow-countryman of Mr. W. M. 
Shuster, at the other end of the line, was highly inter- 
ested in this practical aspect of the Anglo-Russian Agree- 
ment of 1907, replied that it did not matter: asps he 
must have. He was of course within his rights, for this is 
a Russian road. Nevertheless the Sah'b, as a subject 
of a friendly semi-allied Power, and as a frequent client 
of the road, went over to interview the Russian consulate. 
The Russian consulate, as the paramount Power in north 
Persia, stuck to its guns, saying that the mail had 
precedence over all travellers and that the natb had no 
business to sell us a ticket on Wednesday night. So the 
subject of the semi-allied friendly Power came back eating 
enraged cow, as the French saying goes. And we sat 
twirling our thumbs while the mail jingled away to 
Tehran and beyond the balcony invisible Resht filled the 
night with romance. 

29 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Hard on midnight, when we got tired of twirling our 
thumbs and began to think we might better go to bed, the 
naih suddenly produced horses. Out of the lamplit room, 
down the wooden stair, into the mud puddle at the bottom 
of it, through the smokily lighted arch of the post-house we 
hastened, and prepared for flight. There was something 
dark and furtive about this hasty midnight departure that 
reminded me of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, when 
they fled away to Varennes in that herline of Carlyle's. 
Into our herline we crammed all the luggage we could 
between the seats, over the whole affair we spread rugs 
and cushions so as to make a species of bed, and the 
Sah'b and the Khanum, like King Louis and Queen 
Marie, settled themselves with what ease they might 
in this Persian sleeping car, while I, an elderly Dauphin, 
headed the opposite way, stuck my legs between them. 
Then the mekhter, the post-boy, appeared with the long- 
awaited horses — and when I saw them I didn't wonder 
that they were called asps! — an auk's egg with a sleepy 
driver under it mounted the box in vast disgust, and 
away under a cloudy moon to Varennes, or Hamadan, 
we began to roll. 

Ill 

King Louis and Queen Marie would no doubt have been 
highly amused had they known how thrilling to the Dau- 
phin seemed this mild adventure, how strange the gray 
moonlight and black trees of which he caught glimpses 
through the window of the herline, how romantic the 
jingle of bells that kept growing louder or fainter through 
the dark, how impossible to close one's eyes upon one's 
first journey in Persia. Between two and three o'clock 

30 



ANABASIS 

in the morning the herline halted at the first stage of our 
anabasis. This was at an invisible place called Kudum, 
six parasangs out of Resht. I was delighted to meet an 
old friend in so unexpected a spot. For you are to know 
that a parasang is no invention of Xenophon, but a word 
still used in Persia to measure distances, under the Arabi- 
cized form oi farsakh. It is, however, a somewhat vague 
term, being according to different authorities the distance 
at which you can see a camel and distinguish whether it 
be white or black, the distance at which you can first 
hear the roll of an approaching drum, or the distance 
which a loaded mule can travel in an hour. It varies 
accordingly from two to five miles. In this case six 
farsakhs is equal to sixteen miles. 

There was a sound of voices, of horses being unhar- 
nessed and led away. Then a kola, which is the true name 
of a Persian auk's egg — or any other hat, for that matter 
— darkened the window, and a post-boy drawled very 
distinctly the two syllables: 

"Malnistr 

These mysterious words elicited such sounds of des- 
peration from the Sah'b that at first I couldn't get out of 
him what they meant. It finally appeared that they 
meant "there is no property,'' and that on the road prop- 
erty and asps are interchangeable terms. Expostulation 
was of no avail. Bribery was of no avail. The post 
had just gone on in four, no in five, gharries — gari is a 
true Persian word — and there was no property — for im- 
patient subjects of friendly semi-allied Powers or even 
for fellow-citizens of Mr. W. Morgan Shuster. There 
would be no property for an hour, or at most an hour and 
a half. So there was nothing for it but to snooze pleas- 

31 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

antly in the herline while carts rattled by on the Russian 
road, while strings of mules and donkeys went by with 
much jingling of bells, while caravans went by, real 
caravans of real camels, slouching dimly past to a extraor- 
dinarily broken music of different-toned bells. Beside 
them dark figures trudged silently. I thought of that 
wretched Belgian lady and smiled, secretly, at my own 
foolishness. 

The next thing I knew it was past five in the morning, 
twice the hour and a half the mekhter had promised, and 
we were still standing serenely in front of the post- 
house at Kudum, without property and without prospect 
of property. As the Sah'b showed no sign of being con- 
scious of this intolerable situation, I crawled gingerly 
out of the herline to stretch my cramped legs. A vague 
figure materialised off the ground behind us and walked 
away. Other vague figures trudged down the road, 
kola on head and bag or tool on shoulder. It was be- 
ginning to get light, and it drizzled a little. Events of 
the deepest significance for one's first morning in Persia ! 
''Call the mekhter'' suddenly suggested the Sah'b out of 
the herline. Having no other means of communicating 
with a mekhter, I proceeded to pound on the closed shutter 
of the post-house. After a time the shutter was with- 
drawn, a greasy kola stuck part way out — and nothing 
more happened. 

In the end, of course, it was the Sah'b who got us out 
of Kudum. Once under way, we soon began to climb — 
into a country of hills and woods that gradually nar- 
rowed to the valley of a river. Sefid Rud is the name of 
it, or White River. I smiled again, thinking of another 
White River whose valley in Vermont I have long known. 

32 



ANABASIS 

The Persian White River is a much bigger stream, flow- 
ing where first I saw it in a wide, sandy channel, and its 
valley is on a more heroic scale. The sky cleared as we 
went on, and we caught glimpses in front of us of the huge 
mountain wall of Elburz, with scarfs of cloud drifting 
across its incredible heights. But the lumber rafts float- 
ing down on the current, the colour of the autumn foli- 
age, the ferns and brooks beside the road, and the talk 
of my two companions, made it hard to believe that we 
were really in Persia. No Vermonter, to be sure, would 
ever walk abroad like the peasants we met in such rags 
of such faded blue. The women's rags were gayer, and 
they often carried a child on their backs. Gayest of all 
were the high two-wheeled carts we passed, with hoop 
tops, and the bigger four-wheeled gharries, with passen- 
gers sitting on piles of boxes and bales. And the harness 
of their horses was bright with brass and with dangling 
tabs of brilliant wool or polished metal. The khans 
and tea houses along the way, for the use of such travellers 
as do not travel post, were of the now familiar peaked 
gray thatch. And we passed a camp of camels, which 
always travel at night except in cold weather. Their 
packs and pack-saddles lay scattered on the ground and 
the big beasts crouched in rows or circles, munching hay 
as superciliously as if it had been Nesselrode pudding. 
But while I knew in my heart that under these casual 
unfamiliarities life is after all life, whether in Persia or 
Vermont, and that a man will probably find out more 
about it by sticking to his own valley, I somehow derived 
an immense inner satisfaction from the mere fact that 
this was Persia and not Vermont. On such simplicities 
hangs the happiness of man! 

33 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Suddenly, toward noon, just before we reached the 
post-house of Jamshidabad, a strange thing happened. 
We had been climbing steadily through autumn woods, 
with the picture growing increasingly clear in front 
of us of the northern wall of Persia, to say nothing of the 
problem of getting over it, when, at a turn of the road, 
woods, autumn leaves, the very trees, disappeared as if 
by magic. We had the better opportunity to take in 
this extraordinary change because, again, there was no 
property at Jamshidabad. However, if all the post- 
houses of Persia were like Jamshidabad the fashion of 
driving in day and night might become less popular than 
it is. The rugs on the brick floor looked clean enough to 
sleep on — though the real proof of that would be to try it ! 
Behind the house opened a little walled quadrangle, cut 
into quarters by two transverse paths, with flower beds 
in each corner and a round brimming pool in the centre. 
We lunched on the porch in front, looking down on a wide, 
sandy valley of parted water, some of the threads steely 
bright, others strangely blue. The opposite slope of the 
valley was cleft by a ravine whose mouth was stopped or 
deflected by a flat hill spur. We amused ourselves by 
building castles there, within hearing of the river and in 
sight both of the green lower region of woods to the north 
and of those higher and barer peaks of the south toward 
which we were bound. 

It was the middle of the afternoon before we succeeded 
in getting away from Jamshidabad. The road houses of 
the bleak country into which we now began to penetrate 
farther indicated the suddenness of the change from the 
lower valley. They no longer had thatched or peaked 
roofs, but flat ones of mud. All the more surprising, there- 

34 



ANABASIS 

fore, was it, after having begun to get used to this timber- 
less land, to dip down to the river again and discover a 
plantation of olive trees. Such tall and bushy olive trees, 
too, I never saw in Greece or Sicily. As a matter of 
fact, they were planted, the Sah'b told me, by veritable 
Greeks, who form quite a colony at Resht and who cannot 
exist without the olive oil which forms no part of the 
Persian menu. 

There at Rudbar we changed horses again and rattled 
away through a long village street dimly lighted by a 
few lamps but allowing one to catch vague moving pic- 
tures of shops, tea houses, sn^ithies, and an American 
sewing machine which had somehow found its way into 
the Greek olive grove of that Persian valley. Beyond the 
olive trees the valley narrowed to a black gorge, where 
the air at last began to feel like the end of November. 
And the wind blew so hard, especially when we crossed 
the river on a long Russian bridge, that we were glad 
enough to get out at the post-house of Menjil, just be- 
yond, and drink some scalding tea. Menjil is, so to 
speak, another White River Junction; for three valleys 
come together there, and a caravan trail, not carriage- 
able — as the French and Italians conveniently say — 
follows the Sefid Rud part way to Tabriz, while the main 
road presently branches off to Tehran. 

The latter was the one we followed, through a high, dark, 
windy land of stars, with water somewhere in the bottom 
of it. I caught the pallor of that water, and the delicious 
sound of it, when we stopped at midnight at a post-house 
appropriately named Bala Bala, which means High High. 
Louis and Marie Antoinette slept like reasonable beings, 
having enjoined me when I got out to stretch my legs to 

35 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

see to it that the naib kept his word and brought us asps 
in twenty minutes. The twenty minutes passed, and the 
half hour, while I, false friend, dallied to admire a caravan 
that jingled up out of the dark in front of us. I could 
make out the shapes of curved necks, high-piled bales, 
and marching men, that passed to a strange accompani- 
ment of bells. This obbligato seemed to play in a chord 
of four notes, of which the loudest and deepest was also 
the rarest. The caravan rounded the curve of the chapar 
khaneh, jingled off up a black side ravine, jingled back 
more softly on the upper side of the tilted hair-pin bend, 
and finally made away diminuendo in the direction of 
Menjil, the bells growing fainter and fainter till there was 
nothing to hear but the rush of the water in the dim 
valley below. Near by, in the post-house, I could see our 
driver and the mekhter and half a dozen ragamufifms 
among whom might or might not be our new driver, drink- 
ing tea and smoking those straight black pipes — with 
enough opium in them, perhaps, to make them indiffer- 
ent as to whether they stayed on the road or pitched over a 
precipice into the river. I watched and listened, lost to 
all sense of duty. But the Sah'b mumbled something 
sleepily out of the carriage and I, brought back at last 
to the realities of life, made such sounds to the naib that 
his post-boy presently brought us our handful. 

One remembers the nights of life for reasons the most 
diverse; but among remembered nights I think I shall 
always include that particular one. The sky was so 
clear and the air, after all, so mild, that we had dropped 
the top of the herline. The wind in our faces was de- 
liciously fresh, therefore, and as we lay comfortably tucked 
up in rugs and pillows we could open our eyes, without 

36 



ANABASIS 

the slightest effort, upon the dark shapes of the moun- 
tains, the endless caravans we met or overtook, the moon 
that suddenly peered from behind some jagged height. 
It was amazing what a quantity of silver contrived to 
drip out of that dried-up little moon and what tricks it 
played in that wild pass Part of the magic, of course, 
was that I was only half conscious. But I remember 
waking up once, or passing from one dream into another, 
in a hollow enchanted with moonlight, where we stood 
still while invisible water rushed past us and somewhere 
over our heads echoed a long-drawn chime of camel bells. 

IV 

The second morning found us stranded again beside 
the road, in a barren place called Molla Ali, where the 
dawn broke over a background of the Venetian school. 
Near by were the same slim poplars of a few faded leaves, 
and in the distance were the same sharp blue peaks. 
They presently turned rosy, however. And what is 
more they stayed so, even after the sun had cleared the 
heights of Elburz and brought the world back to its 
normal colour. It was a stonier and loftier world than 
the valley of olive trees where the light had left us, made 
up entirely of ruddy rocks, cleft by deep canyons and over- 
looked by soaring crags where the road looped and zig- 
zagged in the most fantastic way. We gained the sum- 
mit of one pass, only to plunge down again into new 
depths and narrower. In them, while we waited for 
horses at the post-house of Yuz Bashi Chai — a perfectly 
authentic Turkish name meaning Captain's Brook — a 
caravan of Canterbury pilgrims, or pilgrims from Kerbela 
rather, was good enough to ride under the terrace on which 

37 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

we kicked our heels. A Persian Wife of Bath was one of 
the most conspicuous figures in the cortege, being en- 
veloped from top to — well, not quite to — toe in a shape- 
less black domino which I believe they call a chader. As 
she rode astride like the men, we had no trouble in seeing 
her toes, which were encased in emerald green stockings 
that were apparently a part of some wonderful trousers 
she wore. And the face of the poor wretch was com- 
pletely covered by a thick white cloth which had in it 
only a strip of open-work embroidery in front of her eyes 
for her to look out of. Other ladies, who had small chil- 
dren with them, sat on little railed platforms slung on 
either side of a mule's pack saddle. Is not such a plat- 
form what used to be called a cacolet, before the word 
and the convenience passed out of use in our part of the 
world? And still others crouched uncomfortably in a 
double litter which the Persians name a kejaveh, a sort 
of domed cage or kennel mounted in pairs on a pack ani- 
mal. 

From the Captain's Brook we climbed again, this time 
to the real top of the pass, 7,000 feet above the Caspian — 
though the Caspian, you remember, lies a little lower than 
the Black Sea. A sort of bare plateau was here, over- 
looking various branching valleys and overlooked in turn 
by loftier snow peaks of Elburz. That northern ram- 
part of Persia is really the most imposing range in Asia, 
after the Himalayas, though here it reaches a height of 
no more than ten or eleven thousand feet. In this wild 
place we came upon the gravestone of a Russian en- 
gineer. ''He who dies in a strange land dies the death 
of the martyrs," say the people of the Prophet. And in- 
deed it must have been an unhomelike place for a son of the 

38 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

steppes to breathe his last in, among those remote heights 
whose older associations are all of the Fire Worshippers 
and of the gruesome order of the Assassins. But so 
many of our own race have left their bones in unlikely 
corners of the earth that we did not need to feel too 
sentimental about the engineer who lay on that great 
divide, among the rocks he had made passable for the 
feet of his countrymen. 

From there on we descended, overtaking at Buinek 
another Russian, a live one, reported to us as having come 
up with the post. We looked darkly at him, suspecting him 
to be the guilty man for whom the consul at Resht had 
snatched our horses. However, there were soon better 
things to think about than our wrongs. For another brusque 
change brought us into a new country that opened in 
front of us almost as far as we could see, till the sunlight 
caught a white, upturned rim at its outer edges. "This," 
said the Sah'b, ''is Persia.'* I looked at Persia with vast 
interest, thinking involuntarily again of our Belgian lady. 
There were certainly no roses or nightingales about, 
neither palaces of porcelain or so much as a camel. It 
was, though, a country of a kind I had never seen before: 
wide, flat, or at most sloping a trifle toward the east, 
tawny-coloured, with a tawniness that had an under- 
painting of pink in it, and walled on the north by the 
snowy serrations of Elburz. They looked less formidable 
than before, and with good reason, since this side of the 
mountain is three or four thousand feet higher than the 
other. But what struck me most was the light that lay 
over the land, of utter clearness, yet not hard or cold, 
and indescribably serene. 

As we rolled down the long, tilted plain I looked hope- 

40 



ANABASIS 

fully for the white cone of Demavend— that not quite ex- 
tinct volcano which towers 19,000 feet behind Tehran — 
in vain. But the city of Kazvin soon made something 
else to look for, darkening the tawny levels with its blur. 
The vicinity of it began to be indicated by the look of the 
fields about us, by thickening orchards and clumps of 
poplar trees. Then, as sunset started to do poetic things 
with the tops of the mountains, we saw above the trees 
a brown city wall, irregularly scalloped, and above the 
brown city wall two domes blue as jewels. 



41 




Ill 

KAZVIN 

Let me give you somewhat to memorise Casbyn, wherein have 
been acted many Tragick scenes, in their time very terrible. 

Sir Thomas Herbert: SOME YEEREs TRAVELS . . . 



WE ENTERED Kazvin by a gateway 
which among gateways was a sight to see. 
The frame of wall about it was gaily faced 
with green and yellow tiles, which also 
encrusted the stubby pinnacles rising above the wall on 
either side. When I looked at those tiles again, in a more 
uncompromising light, I admitted to myself that I had 
seen much better tiles. But the quaint and decorative 
effect of them in the twilight should have consoled Ma- 
dame ITnspectrice for her porcelain palaces, as they made 
me forget the loss of Resht. Through that gate we 

42 



KAZVIN 

clattered into a long street, not quite straight and only 
wide enough for two carriages to pass, which was 
crowded with strolling kolas. The lamps had just begun 
to twinkle in the little shops on either side, bringing 
out sudden glints of metal, spots of colour, shining eyes, 
shallow porticoes full of tea drinkers, big arches leading 
into dark courts, and upper balconies where one caught 
now and then the red glow of a pipe. These things 
and many more delighted me so much that I at once put 
up a petition to Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, 
to the end that with heaves, glanders, and all other 
equine ills might be smitten the asps of the post-house 
of Kazvin. 

The .street presently spljt in two in front of a high mud 
wall, rudely crenellated like the wall of the city. This 
we proceeded to skirt, turning first to the right and then 
to the left, till we came out into such an esplanade as I 
have seen only in certain great western capitals. Hum- 
ble New York, at any rate, has never been able to treat 
herself to such a perspective. At the end by which 
we entered it the crenellated wall gave place to a monu- 
mental white archway, looking down the length of the 
esplanade toward an imposing palace at the opposite 
end. We drove toward it, between lines of plane trees 
and locust trees still in the sere, the yellow leaf, that 
partly hid the low houses behind them. Arriving in 
front of the palace I had time to make out between the 
poplars surrounding it a lower arcade, an upper loggia, 
and certain fanciful decorations in coloured tiles, before 
we turned the corner of it. And I was wondering whe- 
ther it were the governor's palace or the headquarters of 
the Russian commandant, when we suddenly drove 

43 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

through an arch into a brick court behind it. This porce- 
lain palace, if you please, was the chapar khaneh f 

Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, heard my cry. 
At the Sah'b's anxious inquiry with regard to asps, the 
naih solemnly swore he had none. Now this was a patent 
and easily refutable contravention of the truth. At 
Kazvin, if anywhere, there are always asps; for at this 
halfway house the Russian road forks, one branch going 
east to Tehran and one south to Hamadan. But by the 
time the naih got around to confessing that, upon minute 
search, there might be found in his stables a jade or two, 
just returned starved and breathless from a journey of 
many parasangs, the good-natured Sah'b took pity on his 
passenger. He decided that a night in a bed might not, 
after all, be amiss after two nights in a herline. 

At close quarters the porcelain palace looked a little 
less splendid than it first appeared at the end of its vista 
in the Persian twilight. Nevertheless, the white arcade 
opening upon the court, surmounted by an upper terrace, 
was highly effective. Within, two spacious brick corri- 
dors cut through the lower floor at right angles. An 
anxious underling in a long black coat and a tall black 
kola stepped forward to escort us to our rooms. The 
Sah*b*s and the Khanum's was perhaps more luxuriously 
fitted out with rugs and sketchy toilet arrangements. 
What mine lacked in these humble conveniences it made 
up in its palatial size, in its glimpse of the esplanade 
through outer arches and poplars, and in its floor of square 
tiles — turquoise and dark blue, set obliquely to the lines 
of the room. And while I discovered to my sorrow that 
the bad Turkish which had proved vaguely intelligible to 
certain of the inhabitants of Baku and even of Resht 

44 



KAZVIN 

produced nothing but blank looks upon the countenances 
of Kazvin, I did contrive at last to wash off some of the 
dust of the Russian road into a tin basin set on a chair. 

Having ordered dinner, we took a stroll in the now dark 
esplanade. At our end of it a quantity of fruit and vege- 
table stalls were set up under the plane trees. Lanterns 
lighted the overhanging branches and obscurely made 
visible the tiny panes of certain high windows behind 
them, and brought a little colour out of pyramids of 
apples, melons, and grapes. The latter did not look 
quite like the ones which Sir John Chardin describes as 
"the fairest Grape in Persia . . . being of a Gold 
Colour, transparent and as big as a small Olive," of which 
he further avers that "they also make the strongest Wine 
in the World, and the most luscious.'' But it is a long 
time since the French jeweller of Isfahan saw them, and 
it was now November. So we treated ourselves to a long 
yellow melon, and after a look at the ghostly gateway 
at the farther end of the esplanade returned to our inn. 

Dinner was somewhat provisionally served in a big 
brick room ornamented with Russian advertisements of 
beer, vodka, and agricultural machinery. The table- 
ware, moreover, was not quite of palaces, or even of third- 
class hotels in other parts of the world. But the feast 
itself left nothing to be desired — or so it seemed to us, 
who had not indulged in what might be called one square 
meal since we left our Caspian steamer two days before. 
And after it I, in spite of my propensity to prowl in 
strange towns at night, was good for nothing but bed. 
Yet even that night was not without its impressions. For 
twice before morning was I roused by an extraordinary 
uproar in the esplanade. It made itself vaguely known 

45 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

through my dreams of camel bells by a wild clamour of 
pipes, trumpets, and drums, blaring out something that 
neither was nor was not a tune. The first time I jumped 
up to look out of the window, seeing nothing but a smoky 
flare of torches in the distance. The second time I merely 
turned over in bed, saying luxuriously to myself: ''This 
is Persia!" Strange what will exhilarate or console the 
heart of man! But I have no idea what it was. A 
wedding procession, perhaps? Or one of those wonderful 
orchestral performances, a nakara, that used to greet the 
rising of the Persian sun — and still may in some places, 
for aught I know? Or could it have been a dream of that 
picturesque orgy which honest George Manwaring de- 
scribes in his account of the meeting between Abbas the 
Great and Sir Anthony Sherley in 1600? After a banquet 
in the palace of Kazvin and a festivity in the Bazaar, 
one feature of which were twenty dancing girls 'Very 
richly apparelled,'' the Persian king took the English 
adventurer on his arm and walked "in every street in 
the city, the twenty women going before, singing and 
dancing, and his noblemen coming after, with each of 
them one of our company by the hand, and at every turn- 
ing there was variety of music, and lamps hanging on 
either side of their streets, of seven heights one above 
another, which made a glorious shew." 

II 

The next morning was a heavenly one, warm and clear, 
throwing such a light on Kazvin that the Sah'b — may his 
shadow never grow less! — who had known me too long 
to be ignorant of my simple curiosity about the outward 
appearances of life and my incurable habit of carrying a 

46 



KAZVIN 

camera over my shoulder, postponed his first view of 
that new house in Hamadan long enough to let me prowl 
a Httle in the fallen capital of the Sophies. 

Among the cities of Persia, Kazvin is by no means one 
of the oldest or of the most famous. Still, It is able to 
boast a reasonable antiquity, having been founded, as 
the story goes, by the Sasanian king Shapur the Great, 
who reigned from the day he was born in 309 to the day 
he died in 379. Kazvin entered upon a more authentic 
period of its history in the time of the Caliph Harun al 
Rashid, himself half a Persian, who built a mosque there 
in 786 and otherwise beautified the town. It had the 
honour to be captured some three hundred years later by 
the Old Man of the Mountain, chief of the order of the 
Assassins, whose modern successor is that loyal Indian 
personage the Aga Khan. Kazvin was captured again 
and all but destroyed by the Mongols in 1220. Enough 
was left of it, however, for Hulagu Khan to make his 
headquarters there in 1256 when he set about sweeping 
the Assassins out of their mountain eyrie of Alamut, in 
the Elburz, thirty miles away. Toward the end of the 
next century the place was again captured and destroyed 
by Timur and his Tartars. But in 1 548 Tahmasp Shah, 
second of the Safevi dynasty, finding Tabriz a little too 
near the Turks for comfort, moved his capital to Kazvin. 
And during the next half century or so, until Abbas the 
Great decided that Isfahan suited him better, the city 
enjoyed the period of its greatest prosperity. 

A number of celebrated Persians were born in Kazvin, 
among them being that half-fabulous fabulist Lokman, 
the Oriental Aesop, the historian Musteufi, the poet 
Kazvini, and the painter Mir Imad, whom Abbas the 

47 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Great caused to be put to death for a too witty poem. 
And they say that when the Indian Mogul Jahangir 
heard about it he burst into tears, crying out against the 
cruelty of the Persian Shah, whom he would gladly have 
paid for poor Mir I mad his weight in pearls! Many other 
renowned people have lived or died in Kazvin, and famous 
Europeans not a few have described it in their travels. 
Whether Marco Polo actually passed that way in 1280 I 
do not quite make out from his entrancing book. But 
the Spaniard Don Ruy Gonzalez di Clavijo, who went 
to Samarkand on an embassy to Timur in 1404, passed 
through Kazvin. Pietro della Valle stopped there in 
1 6 18. The English ambassador Sir Dodmore Cotton 
died and was buried there in 1628, as his companion Sir 
Thomas Herbert so inimitably relates. Sir John Chardin 
spent four months there in 1674. Master Anthony 
Jenkinson took up the affairs of the Muscovy Company 
with Tahmasp Shah in his new capital in 1562, followed 
by Arthur Edwards in 1 566. And during the eighteenth 
century Elton, Hanway, and several other Englishmen 
connected with the British Russia Company might have 
been seen on that handsome esplanade. 

Englishmen have always been great travellers and 
great writers of travels, and so many of them have walked 
the esplanade of Kazvin that I cannot begin to catalogue 
the associations it has with men of our race. Whereat 
let no American prick up patriotic ears. For when Sir 
Dodmore Cotton, for instance, died in the city of Tah- 
masp Shah my own ancestors had not quite made up their 
minds to move from Old England to New England; so 
that for Sir Dodmore Cotton and his contemporaries I 
have quite as close a fellow feeling as any Briton born. 

48 



KAZVIN 

And among those contemporaries, among all the English- 
men indeed who have visited Kazvin, none makes a more 
picturesque figure than that Sir Anthony Sherley of whom 
I just spoke — unless it be his brother Sir Robert Sherley. 
This Sir Anthony was, I fear, a sad dog, and one who 
might serve to point the moral and adorn the tale of a 
German historian of the British Empire. Requiring 
him, however, to adorn my own tale, I shall take pains to 
point out at once that he was discredited in his own day, 
which was much less squeamish than ours. And I shall 
add that even in his follies he illustrates the difference 
between the gentleman adventurer, that most typical of 
British products, and the equally characteristic German 
type of the secret agent. Sir Anthony was the scion 
of a country gentleman of Sussex, of whom the most that 
can be said is that he lived to see his three sons celebrated, 
in Shakespeare's lifetime, in a play called "Travailes of 
the Three English Brothers,'' and two of them "worn like 
flowers in the breasts and bosoms of foreign princes." 
He is also supposed to have suggested to King James I 
the idea of creating the order of baronets. For the rest, 
he was most successful in getting himself into debt. This 
trait was inherited in a conspicuous degree by the young 
Anthony. The latter went to Oxford long enough to 
acquire "the ornaments of a gentleman," and then opened 
the chapter of his adventures by accompanying the Earl 
of Leicester to the Low Countries, in that campaign of 
1586 which cost Sir Philip Sidney his life. In 1591, going 
with Essex to the wars in France, Sherley got himself 
decorated for bravery by Henri IV — to the fury of Queen 
Elizabeth, who cried: "I will not have my sheep marked 
by a strange brand, nor suffer them to follow the pipe of a 

49 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

foreign shepherd!" This scrape and his marriage got 
him into so much trouble that in 1596 he sought peace on 
the high seas, setting forth with a small fleet of six vessels 
to capture from the Portuguese the island of Sao Thome, 
in the Gulf of Guinea. Having raided the town of San- 
tiago, in the Cape Verde Islands, he decided that the 
West Indies offered a more promising field for his worthy 
endeavours than the Gulf of Guinea, and he descended 
in turn on Dominica, Margarita, Santa Marta, and 
Jamaica — with little profit to the inhabitants and not 
much more to himself. Being deserted at Havana by 
his companions, he returned to England and engaged in a 
brief privateering cruise with his patron Essex. The 
latter then sent him to Italy to help Don Cesare d'Este 
gain the Dukedom of Ferrara. But this matter had 
been settled by the Pope before Sherley arrived on the 
scene. Our disappointed gentleman adventurer therefore 
consoled himself for a time by seeing the sights of 
Venice. 

It was there that his thoughts were first turned toward 
Persia, by the merchants and travellers whom he met on 
the Rialto. Their accounts of the magnificence and 
liberality of Shah Abbas the Great so excited Sherley's 
sixteenth-century imagination that nothing would do 
but he must go there himself. To that end he gave out 
that Essex had sent him to make an alliance with the 
Shah against the Turks. And in 1599 he embarked at 
Venice with his younger brother Robert and some twenty- 
five English companions, together with an interpreter he 
had picked up in Venice, *'a great traveller newly come 
from the Sophy's court, whose name was Angelo, born in 
Turkey, but a good Christian, who had travelled sixteen 

50 



KAZVIN 

years, and did speak twenty-four kinds of languages/' 
I know those good Christians ! 

Of the many strange things which befell this self- 
appointed embassy I cannot begin to speak. They were 
shipwrecked and shanghaied. They were robbed and 
imprisoned. They made the acquaintance of "a cer- 
tain kind of drink which they call coffee: it is made of an 
Itahan seed; they drink it extreme hot; it is nothing tooth- 
some, nor hath any good smell, but it is very wholesome.'' 
They borrowed goodly sums from the factors of the Levant 
Company in Constantinople and Aleppo and from a 
Florentine in '' Babylon," as our forefathers called Bagh- 
dad. Then passing through "Curdia, a very thievish 
and. brutish countrie," they at last arrived in Kazvin. 
Abbas happened to be away on some military expedition, 
but Sherley was handsomely received by ''the Lord Stew- 
ard" and offered, in the manner of the time, £20 a day 
for his maintenance. When this sum was first brought 
him, Sherley magnificently pushed it aside with his foot, 
saying: " Know this, brave Persian, I come not a-begging 
to the King, but hearing of his great favour and worthi- 
ness, thought I could not spend my time better than come 
to see him, and kiss his hand, with the adventure of my 
body to second him in his princely wars." Which did 
not prevent brave Anthony from later accepting from the 
Shah all manner of splendid gifts, including "very faire 
crewel carpets." 

When Abbas returned to Kazvin, Sherley and his com- 
pany went out to meet him, as the Persian custom is: 
"First, Sir Anthony himself in rich cloth of gold, his 
gown and his undercoat; his sword hanging on a rich 
scarf to the worth of a thousand pounds, being set with 

51 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

pearl and diamonds; and on his head a tulipant accord- 
ing/' — i. e. a turban — "to the worth of two hundred 
pounds, his boots embroidered with pearl and rubies; 
his brother Mr. Robert Sherley, likewise in cloth of gold, 
his gown and his undercoat, with a rich tulipant on his 
head; his interpreter, Angelo, in cloth of silver, gown and 
undercoat; four in cloth of silver gowns, with undercoats 
of silk damask; four in crimson velvet gowns, with damask 
undercoats; four in blue damask gowns, with taffety 
undercoats; four in yellow damask, with their undercoats 
of a Persian stuff; his page in cloth of gold; his four foot- 
men in carnation taffety/' Was not that a sight to see? 
There was likewise something to see when Abbas made his 
state entry, preceded by twelve hundred men bearing 
human heads on the points of their pikes. Some also 
wore necklaces of ears, while others played on trumpets 
two and a half yards long. And the Shah lost no time in 
showing his English visitors their first game of Polo — 
played, I believe, on the esplanade. Sir Stanley Maude's 
officers perhaps lost as little time after their triumphal 
entry into Baghdad in playing a Polo match; but a ground 
for this old Persian game was first laid out there by the 
Caliph Harun al Rashid in the eighth century. 

Sir Anthony was well born, and he must have been well 
made and well spoken, to have induced so many of the 
great of the earth to lend him money and send him on 
wild goose chases. Abbas was apparently enchanted with 
him. He gave him a written charter granting all Chris- 
tian merchants in perpetuity the right to trade in Persia, 
together with freedom from customs and religious liberty. 
And five months after his arrival Sherley got himself 
sent back to Europe on an embassy from the Shah, ap- 

52 



KAZVIN 

pointed to treat concerning that famous alliance against 
the Turks. In Moscow, where Sherley went first, he was 
badly received by Boris Godunov. But this is not the 
place to recount the long story of his other adventures. 
For I regret to state that he never returned to Persia or 
sent the Shah any report of his embassy. This was per- 
haps because he had been disavowed at home, where he 
never returned either. He continued to wander around 
Europe in pursuit of patrons and grandiose schemes against 
the Turks until, poor, garrulous, conceited, and discredited, 
he died in Spain in 1635. 

When Sir Anthony went away on his mission for Abbas 
the Great, he left his younger brother Robert behind him 
as a hostage. Abbas promising "that he would use him 
as his own son, and that he should never want, so long 
as he was king of Persia.'' When two years had passed 
by, and no word had come from the faithless Sir Anthony, 
the Shah began to look askance at Robert. But the 
young Englishman, then no more than twenty-two or 
three, proved his own fidelity by fighting for the Persians 
against the Turks. For this service he was given a high 
command, and seems to have undertaken to reorganise 
the army, especially in the matter of artillery. Abbas 
further showed him his favour by renewing the charter of 
religious liberty first given Sir Anthony, by issuing an 
edict of a more substantial kind, declaring that "this 
man's bread is baked for sixty years," and by presenting 
Sherley with a Circassian wife, a relative of one of his own. 
And in 1608 the Shah sent young Sherley in turn on an 
embassy to Europe, which was so much more successful 
than the other that Sir Robert turned up again in 161 5. 
The Circassian lady accompanied him on this expedition 

53 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

and both of them attracted the greatest attention wher- 
ever they went, as Sherley, in his character of Persian 
envoy, always dressed in the Persian manner and only 
consented to remove his turban in the presence of his 
own rightful sovereign King James I. But he does not 
seem to have accomplished anything very definite, even 
in England, where the Levant merchants objected to a 
mercantile treaty with Persia, on the ground that it would 
spoil their profitable Turkish trade. 

At the end of 1615 Abbas sent Sherley abroad again. 
The most apparent results of this second embassy were 
that Sherley and his wife got themselves painted in Rome 
by Van Dyck. Those portraits were long visible at Pet- 
worth, and perhaps are yet. The mission was brought to 
an end in 1625 by the appearance in England of another 
ambassador from Abbas Shah, a Persian, who pronounced 
Sherley an impostar and struck him in the face when first 
they met. What in this cloudy affair militated most 
actively against Sherley, in the minds of his countrymen, 
was that he did not strike back! As there was no one in 
England competent to pass on the authenticity of Sher- 
ley's credentials, and as he insisted on his own good faith, 
King Charles I appointed Sir Dodmore Cotton as envoy 
to Abbas Shah and sent the three ambassadors packing 
to Persia — Sherley and the Persian refusing to travel in 
the same ship. And when they arrived in India in 1627 
the latter committed suicide, thereby proving to his 
English companions that he dared not face the Shah in 
their company. 

The Shah, for that matter, when they finally found him 
in his summer palace of Ashraf, north of the Elburz, con- 
firmed Cotton in this opinion by the friendliness of his 

54 



KAZVIN 

reception of Sherley. But Abbas was now an old man, 
near his own end, and during the thirteen years of Sher- 
ley's absence the government had fallen into the hands 
of favourites unfriendly to the Englishman. When, 
therefore, Cotton requested an official statement with 
regard to Sherley's credentials, and gave them up to be 
examined, the vizier of the moment again accused Sir 
Robert of being an impostor and refused to return the 
letters, fmally saying that the Shah had destroyed them 
in a rage. This second affront was too much for the 
unhappy Sherley. He died not long after and was 
buried under the doorstep of his house, in that same city 
of Kazvin where he had been received with so much 
honour twenty-eight years before. What is more. Cot- 
ton himself died ten days later. As for Lady Sherley, 
the Circassian whom Van Dyck painted, and whom an- 
other painter, ''one John, a Dutch man,'' robbed with 
the connivance of the jealous vizier, she retired to Rome. 
Thither she caused her husband's remains to be transferred 
in 1658 and buried in the church of Santa Maria della 
Scala. 

Of these matters and many others Sir Thomas Herbert, 
the associate and charge d'affaires of Sir Dodmore Cot- 
ton, has inimitably written in his "Some Yeeres Travels 
into Divers Parts of Asia and Affrique" — a book which 
so competent an authority as Lord Curzon calls "by far 
the most amusing work that has ever been published on 
Persia." I suspect that Chardin thought so, too, and 
borrowed more than one leaf from it. If I had not al- 
ready given a little too much space to this Sherleyan inter- 
lude, I would like to follow Chardin's example. As it is, 
I can only quote what Herbert says about Sir Robert: 

55 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

''Hee was the greatest traveller in his time, and no man 
had eaten more salt then he, none had more relisht the 
mutabilities of Fortune. He had a heart as free as any 
man: his patience was more Philosophicall than his In- 
tellect, having small acquaintance with the Muses: many 
Cities he saw, many hills climb'd over, and tasted of many 
severall waters; yet Athens, Parnassus, Hippocrene were 
strangers to him, his Notion prompted him to other em- 
ployments: by Rodulph the Second hee was created a 
Palatine of the Empire; and by Pope Paul 3. an Earle of 
the sacred Pallace of Lateran; from whom he had power 
to legitimate the Indians; and from the Persian Mon- 
arch had enricht himselfe by many meriting services: 
but obtained least (as Scipio, Ccesar, Belisarius, &c.) 
when he best deserved and most expected it. Ranck me 
with those that honour him/' 

III 

As soon as I saw the esplanade again, the Meidan-i-Shah 
as the Persians call it, by sunlight, I at once made up my 
mind — as I have similarly done a hundred times before — 
that nothing would please me more than to spend the 
rest of my days in Kazvin. Other esplanades, to be sure, 
may be carried out with a more grandiose perfection of 
detail. Yet it had never before been given me to behold 
an esplanade where strings of camels marched, perfectly 
at home, between yellowing plane trees, or under loggias 
with quite such an accent of slenderness and height. 
And the monumental triple white gateway at the farther 
end was really perfect of its kind. This Ali Kapu or 
Sublime Porte of Kazvin is all that remains of the old 
palace of the Safevis, which Chardin says was built by 

56 



KAZVIN 

Tahmasp Shah on the plans of a Turkish architect, and 
enlarged by Abbas the Great. The doorway stands in a 
square white frame, taller than the wings on either side, 
recessed in a pointed arch and set oflf with a little blue 
tiling. No wonder George Manwaring, one of Sir An- 
thony Sherley's company, thought those tiles more pre- 
cious than they are, and described them as "rich stones very 
bright, the like I think the world cannot aflfoord!" What 
gives its particular air, however, is the stalactite groining 
of the recess, and a pointed window over the door, filled 
with an intricate grille of plaster. And on either side of 
it are two smaller arches, set one above the other, the lower 
a plain white ogive, the upper a larger ogive of stalactites, 
forming a railed balcony or loggia, in the back of which a 
door corresponds to the great window of the central arch. 
Seen in its perspective of plane trees, with the standard 
of the Lion and the Sun floating above it, the gateway pro- 
duces an indescribable effect of strangeness and dignity. 
Over the door, according to Chardin, is written: "May 
this triumphant gate be always open to good fortune, 
by virtue of the confession we make, that there is no god 
but God." It opens, now, upon the headquarters of the 
Swedish gendarmerie! 

There were other doorways to be seen in the esplanade, 
behind the trees, decorated with bricks and tiles in an 
interesting way. And I was struck by a stone head 
stuck in the upper cornice of a house, set off by a pair of 
horns. But what presently began to intrigue me beyond 
endurance was a green dome I could see above the house 
tops, while farther away were the tops of two blue min- 
arets. I therefore set out in the southwesterly direction 
in which I saw them, and very soon lost myself in a maze 

57 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

r 

of silent streets whose mud walls were too high and 
too close together for me to catch sight again of that 
tantalising green dome. I did discover, however, any 
number of admirable doorways, recessed in pointed 
arches of brick and set about with coloured tiles — gener- 
ally very bad ones, truth compels me to add. The doors 
themselves were low and heavy, adorned with a fan- 
tastic variety of knobs, clamps, locks, and knockers. I 
also passed several dark arches from which steps or in- 
clined planes led down into the bowels of the earth; 
and out of them men staggered with dripping goatskins 
of water. Some of these arches were very decorative 
indeed with tiles and stalactite vaulting, and perhaps 
an inscription of tile, or cut in pale stone, set above 
them. 

And I did come at last upon those two blue minarets. 
They were not true minarets, being little turrets with a 
covered loggia at the top; for the Persian muezzins, un- 
like their Turkish cousins, call to prayer from the roofs 
of their mosques. This mosque lay so successfully hidden 
behind ruinous mud walls that I could catch only a 
glimpse of it from the rear. But that was where its great 
blue dome was best to be seen, crowned by a second tiny 
dome, set like a closed bud on the stalk of a high drum. 
This must have been one of the domes that caught my 
eye from the plain. What I had not distinguished then 
was that among its turquoise tiles were set smaller green 
and yellow ones, making a spiral pattern that waved up 
from a richly decorated base. I would have liked to think 
that this was the masjid-i-juma which Harun al Rashid 
left Baghdad long enough to build. None of the books 
I have read about Kazvin, however, give me much en- 

58 



KAZVIN 

couragement for thinking so — or even that it was the 
masjtd-t-shah begun by Ismail Shah, finished by Tah- 
masp, and restored by Agha Mohammed and Fat'h AH 
Shah, founders of the reigning Kajar dynasty. These 
books of travel are all very well; but their writers rarely 
stay long enough in one place, or know enough of the 
language, to be satisfactory ! 

The other blue dome I finally found fronting a great 
space of sun on the south side of the town. It belonged, 
the dome, to a structure which I do not too confidently 
name; for so recent and magnificently published an au- 
thority as M. Henri Rene d'AUemagne identifies it, as I 
make out, with the masjid-i-shah. Whereas a passerby 
of whom I stammered inquiry in the matter made some 
reply about Prince Hosein. And in fact there is in Kazvin 
an Imamzadeh Hosein, the tomb of a two-year-old son 
of the Imam Riza whose mausoleum in Meshed is the 
most sacred place in Persia. That this building was a 
tomb rather than a mosque seemed further to be indicated 
by the circumstance that the open space in front of it 
was a cemetery. The ground was all strewn with flat 
and faintly sculptured stones, like that, with no rail or 
tree to guard them. On the side facing the great mauso- 
leum were two lesser ones, as I judged — low, flat-roofed 
structures with pointed brick domes too small for them, 
their facades brilliantly tiled and containing ogival win- 
dows darkly screened by grilles in a wheel design of 
weathered wood. And besides the mausoleum, in the 
crenellated mud wall of the city, was another tiled gate- 
way, like the one by which we had entered the night 
before. I went out of it for a glance at the rear of the 
mausoleum. It was broken, I found, by five deep white 

59 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

pointed recesses of stalactites, each looking at a diflPerent 
angle across the plain. 

But I have not spoken of the facade, which consisted of 
three great tiled arches, the ogival recess in the centre 
being higher than the other two, surmounted by six tiled 
pinnacles. And behind them rose the pointed dome, of 
that form made familiar to all the world by the pictures of 
the Taj Mahal, blue as a turquoise and lightly decorated 
like the dome of my nameless mosque with waving spirals 
of green. What lay between I do not know. I had been 
warned not to pass the portal. The Persians, while less 
strict than the Turks in many respects, are more strict 
in not allowing Christians to defile their holy places. So 
I stood outside in the sun and thought I had never seen 
anything quite so jewel-like. If I had known the splen- 
dours of Cairo and Isfahan I might have been less moved. 
I remembered, too, that Pisa has something to show in the 
way of a sunlit place by a city wall. But in their dusty 
place without trees, in their tawny setting, in their un- 
tempered light, those tiles were like some fabulous and 
forbidden efflorescence of that lion-coloured land. 

The Sah'b and the Khanum — may their shadows never 
grow less! — chided me not for my long absence. They 
even allowed me to loiter in that inviting street by which 
we had entered Kazvin while they acquired pistachio 
nuts, which are one of the specialties of the town, together 
with other things good to munch out of a bag while one 
sits in a herline and post-houses are far away. In the 
daytime, it is true, that street took on a semi-European- 
ized aspect from its Russian and Armenian signs. The 
Sah'b, being a man of tongues, even encountered a cast- 
away Greek, who first nearly died of joy at the unaccus- 

60 



KAZVIN 

tomed sound of his own language and then was ready 
to die of despair because the Sah'b had no time to gossip 
over a glass of mastic. There were also big Cossacks 
doing police duty, armed with bayonet and sabre. How- 
ever, Kazvin will still take a deal of Russianising, as I 
saw for myself in the pot-shops I looked into, the sweet 
shops of unimaginable dainties, the glittering copper 
shops, the smithies full of the acrid smell of a forge. I 
poked my inquisitive nose, too, into more than one arch- 
way, coming once upon a circle of camels chewing the 
cud of bitterness in a galleried court, and again upon a 
novel process of rope-making, carried on between two 
wheeled contraptions in a bigger court of trees. What I 
liked best about that discovery, though, was the great 
tiled doorway at the farther end, and the ultimate pointed 
window whose grille let a little dusty light into the inter- 
mediate darkness. 

I was not the one to complain when, in the herline again, 
we locked wheels with a gharry and had to be extricated 
by a Cossack as polite as he was tall. However, there is 
an end to all things. All too soon the Cossack, who was 
a little less polite to the driver of the gharry than he was 
to us, took away our last excuse for remaining in Kazvin, 
and we clattered out of the porcelain city gate. 



6i 



F 



IV 
THE COUNTRY OF THE SKY 

A journey is a portion of hell. 

— ARABIC PROVERB 

Hey diddle, diddle, my son John ! 
One shoe of and one shoe on I 

— MOTHER GOOSE 

^ ROM the Resht road we branched oflf through a 
suburb of adobe walls and fruit trees not yet 
bare, across a dry gully like a Sicilian fiumara, 
past the scalloped mud battlements that looked 
as if Kazvin lay in no great fear of enemies, away from 
the two turquoise domes glittering behind them, into 
the empty plain. It slanted up a little toward a company 
of hillocks that huddled under a far white semicircle of 
mountains to the southwest. As we made for them a 
shrewish wind that is a specialty of this plateau caught 
us in the back, nipping the Indian Summer softness out 
of the air and reminding us, like those sharp snowpeaks, 
that winter was at hand. The mule trains we met were 
another reminder, for every pack animal carried a snow 
shovel or two. 

For the rest, there was much less to see than during 
the first half of our journey. The traffic of the Russian 
road divides after it gets through the Elburz passes, and 
the caravans bound for Hamadan or Baghdad often find 

62 



THE COUNTRY OF THE SKY 

the open plains easier going, or a shorter cut, besides 
being free of tolls. So we had the country pretty much 
to ourselves. Once or twice we passed a flat mud village 
crouching like Kazvin behind buttressed and crenellated 
adobe walls, but with no porcelain gates, alas, and no 
blue domes to catch an expectant eye. Otherwise the 
solitude was unbroken save by the paler streak of the 
road scarring the tawny wastes. Our chief distraction 
consisted in watching the camel-thorn — small, prickly 
brown balls of bushes that the Elburz wind would uproot 
and send spinning off across the table of the plain, one 
after another, as if in some mysterious game. 

The post-houses, too, were farther apart than they had 
been. They were also more uniform and a little more 
ornate, being solidly built of yellow brick. The name of 
each one was posted over the door in Persian, Russian, 
and French. The sight of those Arabic, Slavic, and 
Latin letters keeping each other company in this Persian 
loneliness let loose in one's head all manner of rumina- 
tions, that went spinning even farther than the camel- 
thorn, though I fear to no more definite end. The ber- 
line, for its part, lumbered on to the end of the plateau, 
where huddled the bald brown hills for which we had been 
steering throughout an entire watch. We threaded a 
corner of this archipelago without much perceptible 
climbing, and came out into another solitary space of 
sun. Upon the white western wall thereof I gazed, like a 
true tourist, with the more respect when I heard that it 
was the outer rampart of Kurdistan. As for us we bore 
southward, changing horses the second time toward dusk, 
at Nehavend. No trouble about asps now, on this less- 
frequented road, with the post safely out of the way! 

63 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

But the sun made us no ceremonies to-night. He did not 
retire slowly, graciously, with the lingering farewell smile 
of yesterday. He abruptly disappeared, from one mo- 
ment to another, as if slamming the door of the west be- 
hind him upon a land as bleak and barren as the dark o' 
the moon. And in the cheerless twilight we seesawed up 
and down toward a ghostlike barrier that towered between 
us and the south. 

About nine o'clock we reached a chilly place of the com- 
forting name of Ab-i-Germ, or Hot Water — from cer- 
tain mineral springs that are a place of resort for rheumatic 
Persians. The post-house looked very cosy, too, with its 
lights and gay rugs. But the naib, deceitful man, had 
no hot water at all. Which was so reprehensible in a 
naib living at Ab-i-Germ that we refused to wait till he 
lighted a fire and put his kettle on, telling him to tele- 
phone ahead to the next station to have a samovar ready 
for us. So it was midnight before we tumbled out at 
Aveh, very cold and sleepy, for a belated tea. After that 
we seriously began to climb again, up and up between 
spectral heights, in the hearing of invisible water, to- 
ward snapping stars. There even began to be a pallor 
of snow beside us, so that my companions speculated a 
little as to what might happen at the top of Sultan Bulagh 
pass. They knew it of old, having once or twice stuck 
there in a drift. And they told me that the post is some- 
times held up there for weeks at a time. For the top of 
that pass is not far from 10,000 feet above the Caspian. 
But what happened was that I, who had never soared so 
near the other world, and who might not have been in 
the best condition after three days of almost continuous 
jouncing in an antique berline, disgraced myself by falling 

64 



THE COUNTRY OF THE SKY 

faint and having to be laid out in the snow beside the 
road with the Sah'b's pocket flask. And the rest of the 
night I filled the herline with ignoble snores, all uncon- 
scious of the wild shapes and astounding stars of that 
country of the sky. 

It was upon a new heaven and a new earth that I opened 
my eyes next morning, when we drew up at the second 
station south of the pass. Sirab was the name of that 
post-house, which I believe means Mirage. Being some- 
what subject to mirages myself, it may have been my 
imagination that added a purity to the air, deepened the 
blue of the fleckless sky, warmed the long-broken slope 
in front of us with a secret gold. But this land was 
certainly much nearer heaven than the one we had left, 
and considerably farther south — about as far as Gibraltar 
or Cape Hatteras. And it is not every day that one sees 
for the first time the sun of the Fire Worshippers rise 
over the rim of the Persian desert. However, as I took 
in this not altogether objective phenomenon I could make 
out that it was related to the brusque sunset of the even- 
ing before. The sky brightened, palpitated; the edge of 
the desert suddenly flashed into incandescence; the in- 
candescence boiled and grew tumid till a bubble of intol- 
erable gold surged clear of the plain : no moods, no glam- 
ours, none of that self-conscious inflammation of nature 
which attends the breaking or the fading of the light in 
more temperamental climates. It was like the solution 
of a problem by an intellectual mind, rather than any 
inspiration of romance or despair. And the look of the 
country contributed "to this effect, with its long, simple, 
abstract lines, of a beauty entirely different from that of a 
land of trees. 

65 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

When I set about assisting at this spectacle more fully 
than was possible inside a closed landau, and to that end 
hunted for my shoes, 1 could fmd no more than one of 
them. Nor could anybody else. Whereat the dread 
truth burst upon me that the other must have fallen out 
by the wayside, who knew how many parasangs back, 
during my humiliating performances on top of the pass. 

''Look here,'' I asked the Sah'b; ''When shall I see 
my trunks again?" 

"Oh, in about two months,'' answered the Sah'b 
pleasantly — "if they don't get stuck in the snow." 

"Can one buy shoes in Hamadan?" pursued I darkly. 

"Very nice ones," he replied — "red, yellow, purple, 
even bright green, and curly about the toes." 

"The devil!" I burst out, very inappropriately for the 
holy Sabbath. "I've got nothing with me but a pair of 
patent leather pumps!" 

"Never mind," the Khanum consoled me. "I'll lend 
you those new arctics I bought in Baku." 

Such is Persia! However, I soon forgot my sorrows in 
another aspect of Persia that presented itself to our view 
as we rattled merrily southward under the mounting 
sun. This was a succession of block-houses, square mud 
towers with loop-holed roofs, each one standing in sight 
of the next and somehow giving, in spite of the telephone 
wires sagging between them, the distinctest of impres- 
sions that we had contrived to drop back from the twen- 
tieth century into the thirteenth. Out of a loop-hole 
would be sticking a rifle or a Russian-looking lamb's- 
wool cap — belonging, nevertheless, to a Persian gendarme 
who does his best to discredit Morier's famous quotation : 
"O Allah, Allah, if there was no dying in the case, how 

66 



THE COUNTRY OF THE SKY 

the Persians would fight!" It was to assist in this worthy 
endeavour that my monocled Swedish friend had travelled 
down the Black Sea in my steamer chair. I ought to 
have been the more willing to lend it to him because my 
fellow-countryman Mr. Shuster had been the occasion of 
his going out to Persia. And that he might fmd some- 
thing to do the Sah'b made the clearer to me by pointing 
out a line of low hills at our right and telling me about a 
Robin Hood of the region, named after the uncle of the 
Prophet, Abbas, who not so many months before had 
pounced out of those hills upon a messenger of the Im- 
perial Bank of Persia, relieving him of the tidy sum of 
17,000 tomans. 

After that I regarded block-houses, loop-holes, and the 
trim blue gendarmes we met patrolling the road, with 
more interest than ever, to say nothing of the barren 
landscape around them. But nothing more startling 
did we see than certain great patches of blinding white 
in the ruddy dun colour of the plains, which gave one an 
excellent idea of what a salt desert must look like. Indeed 
the greater part of the country was no better than a des- 
ert, without a house, a tree, or a stream to see. What 
began to grow more and more visible in front of us was a 
tall, toothed silver mountain. And that, I learned, was 
Mt. Elvend, guardian of Hamadan and neighbour of 
that new house toward which we had been hurrying. 

Of Hamadan itself, however, there was as yet no sign. 
Nor was there any till after we had passed, at noon, the 
last post station of Ag Bulagh. Then I discovered a 
peasant or two driving across the desert on a log of wood, 
harnessed to a minute ox. Although I was not a little 
astonished to fmd out that the peasant was harrowing a 

67 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

field, I was still more astonished to note that the ox had 
no hump. Those Indian-looking cattle all belong to 
the north side of Elburz — unless there be more of them in 
the extreme east and south of Persia. We also began to 
encounter tea houses once more, cubical ones of pinky- 
yellow mud, whose clients seemed not so busy sipping 
the glass that cheers as pursuing that more intimate occu- 
pation which the Khanum dignified with the title of 
The Chase. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear! I 
have witnessed The Chase in the land where the citron 
blooms, but never have I seen it so popular, so passion- 
ate, or followed with so little false modesty, as in Persia. 
A village or two from which these huntsmen came were 
visible in the distance, too much the colour of the country 
to be very conspicuous, but marked by prickly planta- 
tions of poplars. And two huntsmen of a more pictur- 
esque sort kept us company for part of the way into 
town. One of them was a swarthy young man on a 
fiery stallion, who looked as if he might very well be a 
native of that village the Sah'b told me about, not far 
away, the inhabitants whereof, until discouraged by the 
gendarmes, used to make a handsome living by standing 
on a certain bridge of the Russian road and turning out 
the pockets of travellers. Every now and then he would 
dart off across the fields, standing in his stirrups and 
aiming his gun behind him as if to prove that the tradition 
of the Parthian shot is not yet dead in Persia. Upon the 
Sah'b asking him what he would take for his horse, he 
replied magnificently: "It is yours" — and galloped off 
again. His older companion rode a sorrier steed, his 
legs thrust into a couple of saddlebags. But such saddle- 
bags, woven in the manner of fine rugs ! 

68 



THE COUNTRY OF THE SKY 

This part of the tilted plateau was much broken by 
hillocks, some of them so small and so regular in shape 
that they had rather the air of the tumuli of Thrace. 
They rather tempted one, too, to remember that Persians 
had passed through that corner of the world, and Greeks 
through this — until they suddenly parted, to let us down 
into a wide dip beyond. But what they really did was 
to treat me, for one, to that rare enough experience, a 
sensation. For the farther slope of the broad hollow into 
which we began to coast ended in the snow of Elvend, 
seven thousand feet above our heads, though nearly 
thirteen thousand feet in the Persian blue. The toothed 
range that wore the snow was of a ruddy purple in the 
brilliant afternoon light, curving nobly south and east in 
a great amphitheatre about more of a forest than I had 
seen since turning the corner of Jamshidabad. The trees 
of this forest were prevalently poplars, slim and bare as 
masts. And between them looked out tier on tier of 
flat adobe roofs, honey-coloured in the St. Martin's 
sun, not unsuggestive indeed of a wild honeycomb. Or 
it might be a wasps' nest, plastered on the lower but- 
tresses of Elvend. Who knew? I had heard many 
savage things spoken of Hamadan. Nor was there any 
sign of turquoise domes. But if a town is capable of 
perching itself in such an amphitheatre as that, thought 
I, it can very well do without turquoise domes. 

Traific multiplied as we trotted on. Mud walls and 
orchards, nakeder than those of Kazvin, began to border 
the road. Presently four demure young men in long black 
coats and short black caps waylaid the herline and prof- 
ferred the Sah'b and the Khanum an eloquent Oriental 
welcome in a French of surprising fluency. Then a 

69 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

cavalcade of three nice-looking young Europeans, an 
Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Swiss, followed by three 
Persian grooms, cantered up to meet us. No: I made up 
my mind then and there that Hamadan was not a wasps' 
nest! Thus attended we splashed through a shallow 
stream, lurched uphill into tipsy alleys of mud hovels — 
where I noticed one or two built-in bits of Saracenic- 
looking sculpture. At last, having mounted a half moon 
to the top of the town, we drove down a lane between a 
high adobe wall and a willow-bordered field, passed a 
few tall brick gateways, and stopped at one more. 

And so, with one foot in my own American shoe and 
one in a Russian snow-boot of the Khanum's, did I make 
my entrance into the hospitable Swiss bungalow where 
I spent my first night in Hamadan. 



70 



V 
THE BAZAAR 

Hamad an is my native place: and I will say to its honour that 
for ugliness it surpasses every other city of the world; 

That its children have as many vices as its old men, and that 
its old men have the judgment of children. 

BEDI-AL-ZAMAN AL HAMADANI 



THEY tell me there is nothing to see in Hamadan. 
I wonder! I can see for myself that there 
are neither blue domes nor porcelain gates. I 
have also made another discovery. It is the 
more disconcerting because I have read in Prof. A. V. 
Williams Jackson's "Persia Past and Present" a poem 
by Mr. Clinton Scollard, of which every stanza returns in 
the last line to the walls of Hamadan. It therefore be- 
comes my painful duty, as a spinner of literal prose, to 
point out that Hamadan has no walls — at least on our 
side of the town. Yet of private walls it has so many, 
hiding houses, courts, and gardens from the indiscreet 
curiosity of the passerby, that I ask myself if they can 
be right when they say there is nothing to see in Ham- 
adan. 

Nevertheless, it amuses me to go down town with the 
Sah'b. It is truly going down town, for we live on the 
lower edge of a suburb of gardens that slants from the 

71 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

mountains to the city. It amuses me the more because 
the rite of going down town is associated in my mind with 
boats, trains, trams, tunnels, and other devices of the 
West for cheating time. Whereas in Hamadan time 
claims his full due. To go down town, or to go to the 
Bazaar, as we say here, you may if you choose mount a 
horse. You may not, however, call a carriage. The 
streets are too narrow to drive in. The Sah'b and I, 
accordingly, walk. And so do most of the fifty or sixty 
thousand other Hamadanis. If the results of this whole- 
some exercise be not very favourable to the shine of our 
shoes or the crease of our trousers, it at least gives us a 
better chance to see how little there is to see. 

The road outside our gate is at first a muddy country 
lane, enlivened by trees and a miniature brook that can 
never make up their minds which side to run. Presently 
the trees give it up, yielding their place to two blank mud 
walls. As for the brook, it decides to take the middle of 
the street, ferrying dead leaves, onion peels, and more 
equivocal relics to the unknown destination to which it 
finally vanishes under a wall. And it does not take me 
long to make out that the charms of Hamadan are not 
for the nostril. Was that what the more initiated poet 
whose distich I have put at the head of this chapter was 
thinking about? Mr. Clinton Scollard might think so, 
or my Belgian lady. Yet it occurs to me that such a per- 
son as the late M. Cezanne, for example, might note with- 
out disfavour the none too geometric line in which that 
dirty water flashes down the street, the inequalities of 
tone and surface in the irregular mud walls on either side, 
the contrast of their tawniness with the brilliant strip 
of blue overhead. I can also imagine a celebrated citi- 

72 






^,^i»-,ijr^^ 




HAMADAN STREET 
73 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

zen of Lowell, Massachusetts, finding subjects to etch in 
these crooked perspectives, in the shops that occasionally 
break them with broad, overshadowing canopies of dried 
mud, propped up on leaning poplar poles; in the rough 
black arches through which an alley will suddenly plunge 
out of sight; in the flimsy balconies that give an accent 
all their own to a blind mud wall, or the rare windows 
that pierce it, high above the ground, filled with an infinity 
of little panes. But who, without glossing or vilifying, 
could evoke the true mud and cobblestones underfoot, 
the exact key of clear colour overhead, the complicated 
variation of smells about one strong acrid theme of burn- 
ing camel dung? 

The most architectural feature of these twisting cracks 
of sun and shade are the doorways. Some of them, in- 
deed, bar the street itself, shutting off quarter from 
quarter at night or in times of disturbance. None of 
them can compare with the Sublime Porte of Kazvin, 
but all of them make a welcome break in the monotony 
of the endless mud walls and most of them are more im- 
posing than the common run of street doors in Europe or 
America. A gateway, the Sah'b tells me, is the index 
of a man's importance in the world. And the humility 
of his own, together with the lack of any yawning under- 
ling especially deputed to guard it, is what Hamadan 
finds not least astonishing about our new house. 

Beside one low, heavy door, open upon darkness, quaint 
life-sized figures are frescoed: the sign of a public bath. 
Other signs are the striped towels hanging out to dry in 
the little square where three streets come together, the 
bulls' eyes of greenish glass in the mud domes of the roof, 
and a new smell. At any rate, it seems that Persian baths, 

74 



THE BAZAAR 

unlike Turkish ones, contain a central pool, appropriately 
named the treasury, and that the water of this treasury is 
changed as seldom as may be! This news enables me to 
bear with better equanimity the further news that I 
shall never be allowed here, as I have been in Stambul, 
to pollute the interior of a bath with my presence. 

The people we meet all look more alike than the peo- 
ple of any place I have seen for a long time. There is 
little of the colour I had expected — save when a company 
of mosstroopers clatters by on horseback, led by a fan- 
tastic individual in a tunic of peacock green velvet. His 
saddle is covered with a lattice-work of magenta bro- 
cade on white, and all of them rattle with weapons out of 
a museum. Otherwise everybody dresses very soberly, 
the men oftener than not in a loose brown cloak called 
an aha and a brown felt auk's egg, the women swathed 
from top to toe in a black or dark blue chader. It is im- 
possible to tell one from another when their thick white 
veils are down. These have an odd triangular effect, 
being fastened around the crown of their heads, with a 
jewelled clasp at the back, and disappearing in front 
under the dark domino. But I notice that they like to 
throw their veils back when none of their own men are 
near. The consequent revelation of long black eyes and 
high, pink cheek-bones is not too upsetting! In fact, the 
men strike me as handsomer than the women. There 
are many bare legs and feet — too many to be comfortable, 
I am afraid, at 6,000 feet above the sea around Thanks- 
giving time. Yet one youngster patters after us stark 
naked, apparently less sorry for himself than he would 
have us believe. He belongs to the great army of beggars 
that lie in wait at strategic corners or follow one with 

75 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

hand outstretched, making piteous outcries which are 
full of the word khoda, God. They are a distressing spec- 
tacle, with their thin rags, their hideous deformities, their 
emaciated babies. However, you learn the more will- 
ingly how to put them off with a pharisaic ''God be your 
keeper!" when you catch one laughing gaily with her 
neighbour and then bursting into dolorous sobs at sight 
of you. 

Finally we reach the true boundary of the Bazaar, 
which is the river. I am willing to take Prof. Wil- 
liams Jackson's word for it that this river is the Alusjird, 
though I never came across any one else who had so 
definite a name for it. I would be less willing to accept 
the picture of it which Prof. Williams Jackson and Col- 
onel Sykes have borrowed from an old French traveller 
by the name of Eugene Flandin if I did not happen to 
remember the Envoi of ''The Seven Seas,'* how Kipling 
says: 

"each in his separate star 
Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of 
things as they are." 

For myself, I see that pointed bridge of brick and cobble- 
stones less romantically than did M. Flandin, in the year 
of grace 1841. I even have to confess that I do not 
see the white peak of Elvend quite so acute or so aptly 
placed with respect to the bridge below it. But I do see 
that the river and its bridges are a notable feature of 
Hamadan, falling away between boulders and poplars 
into a winding cleft through the clay-coloured town. And 
I see what M. Flandin did not, what perhaps in 1841 

76 



THE BAZAAR 

was not there to see, a quaint low mosque at one end of 
the bridge, with windows of heavy wooden lattice-work in 
which panes of white paper are pasted against the cold. 



II 




Not far beyond the bridge lies the Office. I, being 
used to reach offices by way of a lift, find this Office a 
highly characteristic place. The gateway giving en- 
trance thereto is by no means so august as some others in 
Hamadan. Still, it is a handsome enough brick arch, 
leading into a dark vaulted vestibule. From the vesti- 
bule an inner door opens at right angles into a court 
which no one would ever have expected. It is laid out 
like a garden with trees, flower beds, and brick walks. 
And at the farther end of it lies the Office proper. This 
is a long, low, flat-roofed house, faced with light buff brick, 
whose most engaging feature is the talar in the centre. 

77 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

The talar is a great loggia, raised four or five feet above 
the ground but rising itself through the second story to 
the roof, the outer edge of which it helps to hold up by 
means of two tall and extremely slim pillars with slender 
carved capitals. The two inner corners of the talar are 
decorated at the top with pendentives of stalactites and 
painted flowers in pale yellow, while a good part of the 
rear wall is one immense window. The square lower part 
of the window is cut up into innumerable tiny panes, 
the upper part being an ogival lattice of weathered wood 
like those I saw in Kazvin. And on either side of the 
talar is one more such cusped lattice, not quite so large, 
their intricate dark brown wheels relieving the yellowish 
facade in the pleasantest possible way. 

The Oifice itself is entered not through the talar but 
through a vestibule on either side of it, from which doors 
open both into the loggia and into the adjoining rooms. 
After such an approach, however, it is surprising to dis- 
cover how like other offices is this one. The chief dif- 
ference is in the black-capped mir^as who sit at many of 
the desks. A miria, I might add, is either a prince or a 
scribe, according as the title follows or precedes his given 
name. These mirias are not princes. They are, as a 
matter of fact, nearly all Jews, though they dress like 
Persians and speak French much better than I. But the 
true touch of the country is a woolly brown lamb w^hich at 
the psychological moment a villager known to the Sah'b 
produces from the folds of an aha and presents to him for 
pishkesh: which means that the Sah'b is expected in 
return to gratify the donor with a gift of money rather 
more than equal to the value of the lamb. 

Next the Office, all but, is the Bank. Theoretically, 

78 



THE BAZAAR 

you know, banks do not exist in the Near East, since the 
taking of interest is forbidden by the Koran. Practically, 
however, there is no part of the world where such ex- 
orbitant rates of interest are extorted from the wretch 
who needs money. And there are two foreign institu- 
tions which have branches in all the chief Persian towns: 
the Imperial Bank of Persia, a British corporation, and 
the Russian Banque d'Escompte et de Prets de la Perse. 
For us, however, the Bank is the English one. Its gate is 
rather more imposing than that of the Office. As for the 
court inside the gate, it is smaller and paved with stone, 
albeit watered by the most unbanklike of little rivers, 
flowing symmetrically in shallow stone channels which 
you cross by miniature arched bridges. There is also a 
talar. And beyond the talar I find occasion to be con- 
firmed anew in my idea that Hamadan is not a wasps' 
nest. 

They tell me that the Persian is quick as a Westerner 
to learn those secrets of commercial paper which to a 
Turk, as to myself, are dark as the ways of Providence. 
The game of exchange is one that Persians pick up in no 
time, and the consequence is that the Hamadan branch 
of the Imperial Bank of Persia is rather more important, 
commercially, than its central office in Tehran. They 
also tell me amusing stories of the amenities which under 
the old regime used to be exchanged between this British 
institution and its Russian rival. The English, who were 
first in the field, describe the latter as a pawnshop, since 
it is not run like their own bank on a strictly commercial 
basis, being a dependency of the Russian Ministry of 
Finance. The Russians, on the other hand, do not look 
kindly upon the fact that the English have a monopoly 

79 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

of banknotes in Persia for 99 years — or until 1988. The 
trouble with these notes is that they are good only for 
the town where they are issued, being elsewhere subject 
to discount. Which is the reason why travellers in Persia 
are obliged to load themselves down with sacks of krans. 
But if any branch were at any time unable to redeem its 
notes, the Bank would forfeit its monopoly. So the Rus- 
sians used to collect as many of the English notes as 
they could fey hands on, suddenly presenting them for 
payment at a moment when they had reason to believe 
that the branch they chose was short of cash. But they 
never quite caught the English out. And on one occasion 
the Hamadan branch redeemed so large a number of its 
own notes in so huge a quantity of the minutest coins of 
the realm that the Russians never repeated the experi- 
ment. New light on the workings of the Anglo-Russian 
Agreement of 1907! 

Quite as amusing, to my simple mind, is it to watch 
the people who come and go through the court. I am 
still too green to tell whether they be Persians or not, 
unless they show a certain type of lean, distinguished 
face. Portly Hebrews enter with bags of shekels such as 
we carried up-country. Natives of Baghdad, known by 
their tight silk robes and their drooping fezzes, bring in 
the news of the Tigris. Semi-European Armenians stick 
long noses between the bars of the cashier's cage. And 
one customer would make his fortune at a costume ball. 
His loose clothes are of so pale a blue that I can't imagine 
how he keeps them so immaculate. He wears top boots 
with a curious design cut into the upper edge of them. 
Around his waist is a bulging figured silk girdle, out of 
which protrude suggestive handles of ivory, silver, and 

80 



THE BAZAAR 

steel damascened with gold. A replica of that girdle, 
on a reduced scale, binds about his forehead a black kola, 
taller and more pontifical than I have yet seen. What is 
more, he has features to go with these striking accoutre- 
ments — proud, aquiline, so spare that deep hollows under- 
lie his cheek-bones, yet of an enviable swarthy ruddiness, 
with one broad, black, unbroken bar of eyebrow above 
two profound eyes that seem to meditate anything but 
finance. 

''Who on earth is that magnificent creature?'* I de- 
mand of the Sah'b. 

"That? Oh, only a Kurd," he replies. "Come on." 

Ill 

The Bazaar proper lies a short distance down hill from 
the Bank and the Office, on the same side of the river. 
A mir:[a guides me there, walking in front of me to clear 
the way. He makes nothing of shoving people aside, 
and they, like Prussians on the same sidewalk with an 
officer, make nothing of being shoved. That is how the 
steps of greatness are smoothed in Persia. For the rest, 
no great smoothness is perceptible to my steps. What 
pleases me most about the streets is their narrowness, 
and the manner in which they swerve this way or that, 
and the gay chatter of which they are full. There is 
something Neapolitan about it, something at all events 
not Turkish. And what do I catch sight of through a 
gateway but a dome, the dome of the Masjid-i-Juma, the 
mir:[a tells me — which is to say the dome of the Friday 
mosque — and around the base of that dome a few tur- 
quoise tiles? After all ! 

We turn into a small square, which is dark and damp 

8i 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

by reason of the matting roofing it over, stretched on 
wooden beams. Here is a vegetable and meat market, 
whose stalls leave but a narrow aisle around the edges. 
Dried fruits, fresh apples, quinces, oranges, pile the 
stands. Bunches of big white grapes, looking none too 
fresh, hang from rafters. Beyond are butcher shops 
with live sheep and dead sheep in them, sheep with their 
fleeces and sheep without their fleeces, sheep in every 
stage of dismemberment, hanging from hooks or laid out 
on stained slabs of wood for the admiration of the public. 
Even at this late season flies not a few buzz around them, 
which no one would ever think of keeping away by means 
of any kind of screen. In one corner an old man squats 
in the mud with a quantity of goats' heads lying on the 
ground in front of him. Every now and then a customer 
picks one up by a horn, examines it attentively, and 
lays it back in the mud. Out of another stall comes an- 
other old man carrying a chicken. He wears a leather 
skull cap, and his beard is dyed scarlet with henna. 
He catches the squawking fowl by the wings, which he 
folds back and lays in the mud under his right foot. 
Under his left he sets the creature's legs; and then, very 
deliberately, in the manner prescribed by the canon, he 
cuts the chicken's throat, the blood spurting out over the 
muddy cobblestones. 

We pass on into a crooked alley, lined on both sides by 
little shops. They are open in front, and some of them 
have counters flush with the street. Others have no 
counter at all. In all of them the proprietor sits on a rug 
amid his wares. Among wares that catch my eye are 
hanging metal pots which look like pewter, though they 
are probably tinned copper. The biggest and best ones 

82 



THE BAZAAR 

have Arabic inscriptions on them in relief, together with 
other decorations of arabesques and flowers. I also 
notice shops that would contain enlightenment for the 
textile curator of a certain American museum, who once 
showed me a piece of homespun striped in soft colours, 
with the interesting information that the people of ''the 
Orient*' used it for portieres and sofa pillows. I held my 
tongue: but in this alley are just such stuffs for saddle- 
cloths and saddlebags of the humbler sort, carried by 
mules and donkeys in pack trains. There are also white 
saddlebags elaborately embroidered in colours. And what 
would you say to a flour bag, a plain white canvas sack 
of the sort we throw away, decorated with blu^ flowers 
and I don't know what? 

At last the alley narrows in front of us into a dark arch- 
way. Here is the heart of the Bazaar, a place of twilight 
roofed in from sun, rain, or snow. I have seen something 
like it in Stambul and other cities; but I have never hap- 
pened to see horses, donkeys, mules, camels even, so 
much at home between shops and men. They jingle to 
and fro through the dusky maze, shoving pedestrians 
aside more unceremoniously than does the mir^ia in front 
of me. My confused picture of the Bazaar, however, 
only profits thereby. Rugs are what I see first, hanging 
on walls, spread out on counters, piled in corners. There 
are saddlebags, too, of the kind that belonged to the cava- 
lier on the Russian road, and felts galore. These are a 
great specialty of Hamadan. One common use of them 
is under a saddle, which is likely to have more wood about 
it than is comfortable for the toughest hide. They are 
also popular to sit on or sleep on, or to carpet a humble 
floor. It is therefore an art to decorate them with sim- 

83 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

pie designs in dull red, blue, or green, with the happiest 
results for the eye. 

In general the various trades tend to stick together, 
though their boundaries arq nQt very clear. Every now 
and then I come across a new department of cutlery, 
where are queer curved knives such as might be most at 
home in the girdle of my magnificent Kurd, marquetried 
with gold, perhaps, and having strangely watered blades. 
Then there is any number of jewellers' shops, with 
bowls of seed pearls, big filigree gold earrings, and 
bigger pendants, often crescent-shaped and engraved 
with fine lines or set with uneven stones. You see 
gold beads, too, and odds and ends of coins such as 
are always being dug up in the fields of the East, 
piled helter skelter with cartridges and all manner of 
European abominations. 

No two streets of the Bazaar are of the same length or 
roofed quite alike. Here one dark corridor ends sud- 
denly in a blaze of sun. There another reaches a long 
tentacle down hill, the dim perspective being cut at inter- 
vals by cross bars of light. I am treated, too, to sudden 
glimpses of courts, with camels in them, or a confusion of 
bales, or tall-capped people drinking tea in the sun. But 
long before I have seen all I want to the mir:(a leads me 
around to a part of the Bazaar handsomer than any other. 
This is where the leather merchants foregather. Leather, 
you must know, is another great specialty of Hamadan; 
and the leather men ply their trade not under rafters or 
matting but high brick domes. The way in which some 
obscure architect handled their groined vaulting is a 
thing to see, as are the pointed lunettes of dark wooden 
latticework which he set in the upper gloom of the octa- 

84 



THE BAZAAR 

gons where two streets meet. And there a pointed arch 
is more than likely to open into a quadrangle with a pool 
in the centre, or a trellised brick platform where it must 
be very pleasant for a sojourner in a caravanserai to 
smoke his water-pipe and 
admire the deep cusped 
porches of the close and 
their interior stalactites. 

I fmd here such footwear 
as the Sah'b promised me, 
of the most wonderful shapes 
and colours. The ones I 
admire most are of an 
emerald green, having no 
more than an inch or two 
of hummingbird splendour 
wherein to slip a humming- 




bird's toes. Mine, alas, are not of the gender worthy 
of such shoon. I also admire an instrument of brass, 
shaped like a hand, with which a workman beats a 
strip of vivid morocco. Other workmen, however, run 
American sewing machines as nonchalantly as if they 
had invented them. The saddlers and the harness 
makers are the natural allies of this gentry. Their 

85 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

craft is the more interesting to watch because of 
the deft things they do in the way of decorating. They 
inlay leather of one colour into leather of another colour, 
and devise out of polished metal and slivers of mirror 
glass quaint ornaments that are meant to glitter and 
jingle about a horse. Nor must I forget those leather 
cradles with a piece of wood set into each end for stiffen- 
ing. No one dreams, of course, of leaving that wood as 
it comes to him. It can be carved with little arabesques, 
or covered, if you prefer, with a bit of brocade or old 
embroidery. 

What the mtr:(a saves for the last is a quarter of open 
streets where prosperous Russian and Armenian shops 
do their wickedest to introduce a false air of modernity 
into ancient Ecbatana. He points out to me with pride 
the glass show-windows, the bilious calicoes, the — can I 
believe my eyes? — cheap American shoes. Yet, quite 
accidentally, he shows me something after all. For on 
our way back to the Office we pass the crowded booths 
where the potters of Lalein display their wares. They 
are not forgers or sentimentalists, you understand, those 
potters of Lalein. They supply an honest, every-day de- 
mand for pipkins to cook in, for bowls of every imagin- 
able size, having plain edges or fluted, for flowerpots 
whose two or three handles give them an inimitable 
fmish, for jars to hold water — though they rarely do! 
Then there are all kinds of other jars, slim ones, pot- 
bellied ones, tall enough ones to hold a man, true Ali 
Baba jars, which are used for the storing of wheat and 
other provisions. The biggest jars are double-deckers, 
whose upper storey is conveniently provided like the flower- 
pots with handles. Most of this earthenware is yellower 

86 




87 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

than we usually see, glazed or unglazed as the case may 
be. But a good deal of it is unevenly enamelled in pea- 
cock colour, turquoise colour, the blue-green of the domes 
of Kazvin. 
And they tell me there is nothing to see in Hamadan! 



88 



VI 

LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF SER MARCO POLO 

At the straits leading into the Great Sea, on the west side, there 
is a hill called the Faro. — But since beginning on this matter I 
have changed my mind, because so many -people know all about 
it; so we will not put it in our description, but go on to something 
else. And so I will tell you about the Tartars of the Ponent and 
the lords who have reigned over them. 

Colonel Henry Yule: the book of ser marco polo 

ASA MATTER of fact, there is something to 
l\ see in Hamadan. I regret to confess, however, 
/ \ that I never saw it, or more than the outside 
-^ -^ of it — ^which was one of the things I glanced 
at the first day I visited the Bazaar. Yet, reader, 
I shall further confess that some time afterward, sitting 
in a window above New York harbour, I went to the 
pains to write out by hand and to copy on the typewriter 
a long chapter about that tall-domed mausoleum, whose 
squat porch and solid stone door open upon a species 
of lumberyard neighbourly to the potters of Lalein. To 
that end I turned, very diligently, the pages of Holy 
Writ and of the Apocrypha, not to mention those of 
secular volumes not a few. I then set about sugaring 
for you such pills as the history of Media, of Persia, of 
Assyria, of Judaea. I treated of the Babylonish Captivity 
and adventured so far afield as Lydia and Greece, bringing 

89 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

you back to the campaigns of Sir Archibald Murray 
and Sir Stanley Maude. I even made an excursion into 
the Higher Criticism, steering in a subtle manner be- 
tween the sensibilities of the godly and of the profane. 
But the outcome of the Higher Criticism, reader, has been 
to cut that chapter out of your book. For when I began 
to turn over the tales of earlier travellers I found that 
every one of them had something to say about Esther 
and Mordecai, and their tomb in Hamadan. And most 
of those conscientious men had been into that tomb. 
Whereas I, who passed it so much oftener, never set foot 
there. 

Why, do you suppose, was that? Certainly not be- 
cause Hamadan, or Ecbatana, the summer capital of 
King Ahasuerus, seems to me too unlikely a place for 
Queen Esther to have died in, or because I find no interest 
in the origin of the Hebrew Feast of Purim, or because the 
tradition of the tomb is too recent. As early as the 
twelfth century, at any rate, the famous Jewish traveller 
Benjamin of Tudela saw our mausoleum. The personage 
around whom Kit Marlowe wrote his ''Tragedy of Tam- 
burlaine the Great*' destroyed it two or three hundred 
years later. The Turk Khosrev Pasha, general of Sultan 
Murad IV, destroyed it again in 1630. And the his- 
torian Von Hammer says it then lay within the precincts 
of a mosque of a thousand and one columns; while the 
French father Sanson, who visited Hamadan about 1683, 
mentions our high dome as being a remnant of a magni- 
ficent temple, ornamented with tiles. The existing monu- 
ment, however, seems to be the work of two pious Jews 
of Kashan, who restored it in 171 3. But nothing about 
its present appearance is so picturesque as a piece of 

90 



LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF SER MARCO POLO 

gossip I heard in Hamadan, to the effect that the comfort- 
able fortune of a certain Hebrew doctor of the town was 
founded upon a jar of gold he accidentally unearthed in 
the tomb. 

The fact is, I fear, that I judged the unseen interior 
of that whited sepulchre by its rather gaunt exterior. I 
fear, too, that I am not of those who fmd it essential to 
read the Bible literally. Whether Queen Esther actu- 
ally existed or not is to me less interesting than the circum- 
stance that some one, a longtime ago, made her the heroine 
of an uncommonly good story : not quite so short as mod- 
ern editors like, but well enough put together to be true. 
But why, I wonder, did no Sunday School teacher of my 
youth ever think of telling me that King Ahasuerus was 
really Xerxes the Great? And that between his divorce 
from Queen Vashti and his marriage with Queen Esther 
he made an irrelevant journey which the author of the 
Book of Esther was far too perfect an artist to say any- 
thing about — to Thermopylae and Salamis and Plataea? 




91 



VII 

PERSIAN APPARATUS 

Persicos odi, puer, apparatus. . . . 

Quintus Horatius FIaccus\ carmina 



TO SUCH vague and illusory purposes does one 
go to school! One scans incomprehensible 
lines, one desperately thumbs the dog-eared 
lexicon of youth, and one promptly drops the 
whole affair into a sieve of a memory — in order to pick 
up, years later, out of some clogged corner of that same 
sieve, a title to one's hand! It came to me, with an 
amused grin, when I beheld that new house for which 
we had foregone the unseen enchantments of Resht and 
had fallen into conflict with the paramount Power in 
north Persia. But if I steal the phrase it is not because 
I agree with the poet. The poet I agree with is our own, 
who says something — does he not? — about doing in Persia 
as the Persians do. At any rate, I share with pacifists, 
optimists, and other dangerous classes of citizens a dis- 
position to be too easily pleased by things as I find them. 
And I can nevej* too positively declare that I passed in 
that house one of the most agreeable winters of a misspent 
life. Yet I could not help thinking, the first time my 
eye fell upon it, that Horace had something in common 

92 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

with my Belgian lady, and that the poet of white Roman 
villas might have sung a different song if he had had a 
little actual experience of Persian pomp. 

These reflections were inspired by the simple but per- 
fectly obvious fact that the mansion toward which we 
had been hastening day and night, as fast as asps could 
carry us, was made of nothing more splendid than — mud. 
Adobe is perhaps the more graceful name. And, unlike 
the beaver, you pour it into little rectangular moulds 
which you afterward set out to dry in the never-failing 
Persian sun. You may even, if so you be minded, bake 
some of it in quicker furnaces and produce yellowish 
bricks for the enrichment of a gateway or a facade. But 
elemental earth and water are the foundation of all Per- 
sian 'architecture. The Persian architect therefore need 
waste no time in hesitating between timber, brick, stone, 
hollow tile, reinforced concrete, and what not. He has 
only one possible building material; and the lot on which 
he builds, however humble, contains as much of it as he 
needs. The very roofs are of mud, spread thick on camel- 
thorn and poplar trunks. 

Our roof, nevertheless, was not that kind of roof, being 
a low-pitched, broad-eaved timber one, overlaid by some 
kind of tar paper imported from that ville lumiere of this 
quarter of Asia, Baku. And that was only one reason 
why our house was a worthy goal of so- rapid a journey, 
and an object of so great curiosity to the good people of 
Hamadan. For it also had Craftsman windows wider 
than they were long, provided with admirable window 
seats in the four-foot wall, to say nothing of an arcaded 
veranda more reminiscent of a Spanish -patio than of 
a Persian ialar. Most contrary of all, however, to the 

93 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

laws of the Medes and the Persians, it contained the un- 
heard-of rarity of wooden floors — upon which, we lived 
to learn, rugs had a fantastic habit of billowing in a gale. 
We lived to learn several other unexpected things be- 
fore we got through with it. For a new house has idio- 
syncrasies as distinct as a new ship or a new baby — and 
most so when it departs from accepted traditions. As 
for a new mud house, it is rather more habitable above 
ground, I fancy, than below. Still, our struggles with 
the primitive problems of life brought us nearer in spirit 
to the inhabitants of trenches than to dwellers in onyx- 
hailed apartment houses, who take no thought how they 
shall wash their hands or read their evening paper, or 
wherewithal shall they be warmed. But we belonged to a 
race that is par excellence the picknicker and camper-out 
of the earth, and between us we could scrape up humour 
enough to be amused at our experience of Persian pomp. 
With gas or electricity, of course, we had nothing to do. 
For light we depended on the ''blacke oyle, stynkeng 
horryblye,'' of Baku, eked out by Russian candles. Of 
our various stratagems to keep warm, an oil stove in the 
end proved most effective. In most of the rooms, how- 
ever, we had fireplaces, wherein we burned those piteous 
faggots which in Persia pass for wood. We likewise 
made a good start at burning the dining-room floor, 
thanks to a builder who had never before set a fireplace 
on anything but a mud underpinning and had taken too 
few precautions. I cannot resist adding that this gentle- 
man, an Armenian carpenter, was the "intelligent Per- 
sian" whose topographical information Prof. Williams 
Jackson takes pains to quote. We were further able to 
boast nothing less recondite than a furnace, the invention 

94 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

and the pride of the heart of the master of the house, who 
devised it out of the mud of his cellar and who caused 
mud tunnels to conduct its affluvia into three or four 
rooms. For the nourishment of this furnace we origi- 
nally proposed to use the commonest fuel of Persia, tapeh. 
That, if you insist on knowing, is dried camel dung. 
And among the many and vivid smells of that treeless 
land I shall always remember the odour of burning tapeh. 
We found it a little too penetrating, even when so far 
removed from sight. We also found the problem of the 
conservation of energy more insoluble than ever, when we 
tried to make some sort of equation between the un- 
appeasable appetite of the furnace for poplar wood and 
the infinitesimal amount of heat that rose from the 
registers — which were merely round holes in the floor. 
We therefore closed them and the incident, lest we step 
into them and break our necks. 

Water, in Hamadan, is a commodity even more pre- 
cious than heat or light. You very soon learn to be thank- 
ful if you can get enough to make a cup of tea, forgetting 
such excesses of luxury as hot and cold taps. We tremb- 
lingly dug a well in our cellar — and, thank God, a little 
water oozed into the bottom of that well. What is more, 
we were able to obtain from Baku a small hand pump, 
which was generally in good enough order to send a hope- 
ful drip into the kitchen. Thence to distribute it through- 
out the house was a matter of fetching and carrying. 
Under the circumstances it was too much to dream of 
maintaining more than one bathroom. But, my brethren, 
what a bathroom ! It possessed, for one thing, my favour- 
ite view, looking out of two big windows across the flat 
roofs and sharp poplar tops of the town to that concave 

95 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

plain of such inimitable chameleon changes of colour. 
It further possessed a monstrous copper samovar, con- 
trived by the ingenuity of the Sah'b, into two mouths of 
which uncomplaining underlings fed countless gallons of 
water and numberless bundles of faggots. But the glory 
of the room was the bathtub. The foundation of this 
structure was, of course, mud. The mud was faced, how- 
ever, like the broad sills of the windows, with the square, 
blue-green tiles of Lalein. Have I said that Lalein is a 
village in the region of Hamadan where the lost art of 
glazing earthenware is still humbly practised? Never 
have I bathed in anything quite so pretty as that tank of 
turquoise water. The cement that held the tiles together, 
though, was home-made, lacking anything better from 
Baku; and, alas, it was not a success. Not only had 
it to be washed off after one had taken one's bath, but 
the ceiling of the room below was observed to darken, to 
drip, and most threateningly to sag. And this in spite 
of the fact that the water from the bathtub was supposed 
to run away into the garden! We therefore had to give 
up, with bitter lamentations, our peacock tiles, substi- 
tuting such receptacles of metal or rubber as could be 
improvised out of the resources of the country. 

II 

I may airily seem to imply that I had a personal hand 
In these various arrangements. As a matter of fact I 
arrived on the scene too late to admire the invention of 
most of them. What I was happy enough not to miss 
was the moving In. I fear the Sah'b and the Khanum 
were less happy In entertaining a guest-friend who had 
known them too long to feel any scruple in combating 

96 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

their views and exposing his own with regard to the fur- 
nishing of their rooms. It was perhaps fortunate that 
we were a family of three, and therefore sometimes able to 
secure a casting vote. As often as not, however, we main- 
tained three perfectly irreconcilable opinions. Never- 
theless no open rupture or secret coolness resulted from 
our lively arguments on interior decoration. And I, for 
one, found it highly amusing to open and to dispose of 
the contents of the cases which strange-looking ruffians 
brought to the house on their backs. 

Our two rooms of state, to the vast scandal of Hamadan, 
literally had mud walls, ungarnished with plaster, sizing, 
or colour of any kind, but smoothed past all resemblance 
to their parental earth. For ourselves, we desired no 
better background for Persian plates, for Persian minia- 
tures, for Persian mirror frames, for brasses, embroideries, 
rugs, and other Oriental objects of art which my wise 
host and hostess spent much of their leisure in collecting. 
A good many of these objects had made no great journey. 
But others, intended more strictly for use, had performed 
such an Odyssey that it was a wonder we had a dish to 
eat out of or a chair to sit in. The sojourner in Persia is 
not like his happy cousin of Italy, able to go forth wherever 
he fmds himself and pick up delectable furniture. For 
the people of the East use almost no furniture. They 
require merely a few rugs or mats to sit and sleep on and a 
few plates and bowls for their cookery. So the stranger who 
dwells among them has to transport from oversea every- 
thing he needs for his own more complicated housekeep- 
ing. In a place like Hamadan, accordingly, you must 
first get your goods to Enzeli or to Baghdad, whence 
they are transported 250 or 315 miles by caravan. And 

97 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

if you have seen the sprlngless gharries that climb the 
passes of the Russian road, or if you have noticed how 
mules and camels drop their packs when they make 
camp, you will not wonder that a neighbour of ours had 
the unhappiness to lose an entire dinner set she had im- 
ported. We were delighted to fmd that only about half 
of our own china was smashed. 

For breakage and theft we were prepared, not to say 
moth and rust. What gave us something of a shock was 
to discover that mice had been at our books — as precious 
in Persia as chairs or soup plates. Since the books were 
not mine, I found it in me to smile upon noting that 
Bourget's ''Sensations d'ltalie'' had been devoured from 
cover to cover. O subtle mice of Ecbatana! For the 
French in general they exhibited a remarkable taste. 
They had also found nourishment in Jane Austen, Joseph 
Conrad, and Henry James. It surprised me more to 
find traces of those hungry Persian rodents in certain 
Latin authors, among them the poet of my text, who had 
somehow found their way into that Parthian galere, 
Hakluyt, too, had whiled away some of their hours — 
happily in the not irreplaceable Everyman edition. They 
had passed by our rug books, however, together with 
our books on Persia and such works as we possessed of the 
American Red Blood school. I cannot explain this un- 
accountable vagary. I merely state. 

Our library was on those days when a terrific winter 
wind howled out of the gorges of Elvend the one comfort- 
able room in the house, being smaller than the others 
and having only one big window. This was also the room 
that had least in it to remind us where we were, with its 
rows of Latin-lettered books, its wicker chairs, its tinted 

98 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

walls, and its pictures of other lands. Two of the latter 
were for me an unquenchable wellspring of whimsical 
philosophy. For who should gaze inscrutably at each 
other from either side of the door, reminding me of Paul 
Bourget and the Persian mice, but that adorable minx 
Lucrezia Crivelli, with her jewelled fillet bound about 
her brow, and the romantic Knight of Malta! I must 
add in passing that I cannot believe him really to have 
been a Knight of Malta, because I do not believe there 
were any Knights of Malta when Giorgione painted him 
— if Giorgione did paint him. There were only Knights 
of Rhodes. But if you object to that point of quibbling, 
you might at least call him a Knight of St. John. How- 
ever, there he hung in remote Ecbatana, looking no more 
surprised than his lovely companion to fmd himself so 
far away from Florence, and filling me with obstinate 
questions about western taste and the vicissitudes of 
western wandering. Did Lucrezia and the nameless 
Knight, I wonder, ever in life find themselves so close 
together? And what would they have thought had it 
been told them that their portraits, multiplied by a trick 
they did not know, should in centuries to come adorn 
the house of an Englishman in Persia, who had to wife 
the daughter of a world unknown, or barely discovered, 
in their day? 

When we sat in that room at tea time, with a wood 
fire crackling behind a pair of English andirons, it always 
seemed to me extraordinarily characteristic of the Anglo- 
Saxon race, in which familiarity with the sea has so long 
bred familiarity with lands beyond the sea, but which so 
stoutly takes with it wherever it goes its own language 
and customs. One of us was a true son of St. George, 

99 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

though accidentally born outside the fold of his race. 
Two of us were descended from those contemporaries of 
Sir Robert Sherley who three hundred years ago sailed 
out of Old England to found a New England. Yet there 
we sat in Persia, the three of us, owning none but English 
blood, speaking — whatever Cockney or Cantabrian might 
think about it ! — no tongue but English, and knowing very 
little more about the land in which we sat than you who 
read these words. It was a symbol, that cosy little li- 
brary, of the unconquerable vitality of a race, of the pride 
of a man in his own house and his own acre, which has 
brought forth such miracles as Athens and Venice and 
Oxford, which flowered once into the painting of the 
Renaissance, the literature of Elisabeth. But a better 
symbol was the bare slope of poplars outside the window, 
still Persia after three thousand years of conquest, glory, 
and disaster. After all, I sometimes used to wonder, 
what business had we there? And how about this mod- 
ern fashion of borrowing our neighbour's art? If the 
Florentines and Venetians had followed it as persistently 
as we, had contented themselves with collecting pseudo- 
Greek marbles and Byzantine mosaics, there would have 
been no ghost of a Lucrezia Crivelli to smile across a 
Persian doorway at the shadow of a Knight of — St. John! 
Where shall we end with all this transporting of one 
country to another? Are we going to wipe out boun- 
daries and become cosmopolites all? 

There was no time to answer these long questions be- 
fore our destinies drew us, one after the other, out 
of that little room. And when next we met it was 
seven thousand miles away, when the world was already 
deep in the greatest of wars. Looking at it from a high 

100 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

window above New York harbour, I have sometimes 
seen it as the beginning of an answer to those questions 
of our Persian library. That formidable outburst against 
the ambitions a-prowl in the earth, does it not touch too 
the dream of the Internatiohale, and isolate anew the man 
without a country? For the pride of a man in his own 
house and his own acre is rooted very deeply — nor need it 
imperil another man's peace. The most permanent agree- 
ment of men is to differ. The thing is to recognise and 
to respect each other's differences. If one happy result 
of so much unhappiness should be to let the sun shine 
again on overshadowed lands, another might be to check 
the standardising of mankind. And if emigrations, con- 
cession huntings, even gentleman adventurings fall for a 
time out of fashion, what matter? There is still adven- 
turing to do in a country which has not yet achieved a 
Lucrezia Crivelli of its own ! 

Ill 

The most characteristic piece of Persian apparatus 
in our house, and the worthiest to be considered in the 
Horatian sense, was to be seen below stairs — if you will 
not take that technical phrase too literally. The Sah'b 
used to complain that he never knew how many servants 
we had, one of his favourite diversions being to ask the 
Khanum how many more she had taken on. Persia 
follows the rest of Asia in this regard; though as a matter 
of fact we were not so dreadfully attended as most of 
our neighbours. Oriental servants work for longer hours, 
with fewer outings, than occidental ones, but each one 
does much less. The only one of ours who made us feel 
that he earned every shahi of his somewhat sketchy 

lOI 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

stipend was a laborious, quick-witted, and picturesque 
godson of the great Shah Abbas, a youngster whose voice 
just began to crack. None of them, for that matter, 
were far out of infancy. And it surprised me to see how 
fast they picked up our ways, many of which to them must 
have seemed inexplicable and capricious beyond reason. 

I often wished I knew what their comments were. We 
sometimes caught rumours, however, through confidences 
made to the masters of other servants. When we went 
out to dinner our cook, our butler, or both, would occasion- 
ally go, too, to help in the kitchen or the dining room. In 
fact, it IS not good form for a person of such consequence 
as a Firengi to leave his door at all without a servant 
or two at his heels; though I fear we rather scandalised 
Hamadan by our backwardness in conforming to this 
custom. A Firengi, I should explain in parenthesis, is a 
Frank. Strange, is it not? and subtly complimentary to a 
great race, how since the time of the crusades that name 
has stuck in western Asia as descriptive of all Europeans — 
even Germans! — and their cousins beyond the seas. The 
servants of the Firengi s in Hamadan formed a sort of 
society apart, and you may be sure that among them no 
news was allowed to escape. Thus it came to our ears 
that the Sah'b was known to an inner few as the Chief 
of the Desert — because our house stood by itself outside 
the town! And I was enchanted to learn that I, having 
come to Persia without wives, children, valets, employ- 
ments, or other visible human ties, had been decorated 
with the picturesque title of Prince All Alone. 

You of the effete West are lapped in the soft ministra- 
tions of the Eternal Feminine. To us of sterner Ecba- 
tana is permitted no such Sybarism. I may note, how- 

102 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 



ever, the exceptional case of Firengis with young children. 
A lady of the land may then risk her reputation by enter- 
ing the presence of corrupt Christian 
men. She does so bare-footed, in figured 
red trousers of a fulness, loosely swathed 
in a length of white or printed cotton, 
covering her head and held for decency's 
sake in front of her mouth. Custom, of 
course, will make her less meticulous; but 
when a stranger is present and her duties 
require the use of both her hands, it is 
astonishing how ingenious she is in hold- 
ing her veil in her teeth and in keeping 
her back on the quarter of peril. 

There is another exceptional case to 
be noted of a country where laundresses 
are more than likely to have smallpox 
in their houses. These ladies answered 
to the most aesthetic names: Deer, 
Sugar, Angel, Peacock, Parrot. To us, 
however, they were generically known 
as Sister. They always carried on their 
operations in big blue-glazed bowls, 
preferably set on the ground near the 
clothes line, beside which they would 
squat on their heels. I remember one of 
them who sent us one week a substi- 
tute. Inquiring into the matter the 
Khanum was told ''Sister makes a 
petition: she will have a child. But she 
will come next week.'' And Sister did! The milking 
of a cow is one more exceptional case, since such duties 

103 



■5\c» 



*- \1 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

are too ignoble for man. Here again a blue-glazed bowl 
comes into use, being held between the knees of the 
operator. I might add that for the complete success of 
the operation it is considered necessary for the calf 
to be tied in sight of the cow. Otherwise the sacred 
fount infallibly goes dry. We had the greatest trouble 
to induce our personnel even to try the experiment 
of milking when no calf was in sight. This, I suppose, 
is why the Persians are so unwilling to sell or to kill a 
calf, and why they are so tender of the little creatures. 
The first time the stork visited our stable a small animal 
wrapped up against the cold in green felt was brought 
blinking into the dining room for us to admire. And we 
learned that the calf spent its first few nights with the 
servants, in their quarters. 

These, I hasten to add, were not in the house. While 
there are, especially in Persia, very solid advantages in 
having servants out of the house at night, there are also 
disadvantages — as will appear most plainly on a winter 
morning after a party. We then had the choice of walking 
a long way through the snow to bang on the stable door, 
or of waiting for breakfast. Their own breakfast, and 
all their other meals, the servants were supposed to pro- 
vide for themselves: primarily because a Firengi is an 
impure being, whose food and dishes are defilement to 
those of the faith; secondarily, because a Firengi eats meats 
too strange for the palate of a Persian. We had reason 
to believe, however, that at least in our house the Per- 
sians were not too fastidious about our menu or our pur- 
ity! They had quarters at one end of the stable, with a 
fireplace to keep them warm and a more eificacious inven- 
tion of their own which they called a hursi. A kursi is 

104 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

the counterpart of a Turkish tandur, being a fixed or 
portable brasier covered by a wooden frame, over which 
a quilt or a big rug is spread; and under that asphyxiating 
rug or quilt a considerable household can spend the day 
or the night, tucking themselves up to the waist or the 
neck as the case may be. The boys never could under- 
stand why we didn't have kursis, too. The rest of their 
furniture consisted of rugs, wherewith to cover the mud 
floor. That is why there are so many rugs in Persia — 
the mud floors. And there is another good reason why so 
many of them are a little more or a little less than six feet 
long. For a do-^ar, a two-yard, is all your Persian needs 
in the way of a bed; and if you have such a rug that is not 
brand new, you may be sure that some very picturesque- 
looking customer has dreamed upon it the dreams of Asia. 
I fear that the dreams of our dependents were sometimes 
interrupted. For the roof over their heads was a mud 
one, and being new it was leaky. After a rain or a thaw, 
therefore, we would hire the youth of the neighbourhood 
to play tag on it, in order to pack the mud the harder with 
their bare feet ! 

What to my alien eye was most striking about our re- 
tainers was their dress. To be served at dinner by a butler 
in bare or stockinged feet, according to the season, bearing 
upon his head a pontifical mitre of brown or black felt, 
not unlike the tall brimless hat of Greek monks and Rus- 
sian priests, was an experience which I did not live long 
enough in Persia to take as a matter of course. It always 
gave me the sense of assisting at a rite celebrated by the 
flamen of an unknown creed. It made no difference that I 
myself was perfectly capable of balancing upon my brow 
an even more fantastic erection, eaved like a house, shinier 

105 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

than satin, and garnished with a coquettish ribbon. 
What caught my eye was the extraordinary fact that any 
human being could cherish a headdress different from my 
own, and account himself disgraced ever to be seen with- 
out it. Tall hats, however, were not all that distinguished 
our serving men. Between their kola and their unshod 
feet flapped a trouser not so full as that of the country 
Turk but giving no hint of the leg it contained, and a suc- 
cession of tailed or kilted coats. The Persians think that 
Firengi men dress as indecently as Firengi women, in 
permitting our clothes to follow so closely the lines of our 
bodies. The fit of their own coats stops at the waist. 
From there hangs to the knee, or below, a pleated skirt 
which even a travelled Persian unwillingly exchanges for a 
Prince Albert, while a morning or evening coat is to him 
a thing of shame. Under his outer garment, with which 
he usually dispenses indoors, he wears a shorter and 
thinner one, less amply kilted, the tight sleeves of which 
are slit to the elbow, and dangle decoratively if incon- 
veniently enough, when not buttoned up or turned back. 
This tunic is also more gaily hued. And the open throat 
of it sometimes reveals successive layers of inner integu- 
ments, of contrasting colours. 

The brightest virtue of Habib, our butler, was that he 
possessed a beautiful emerald undercoat in which, when 
there was no company, he was sometimes good enough to 
pass, and eke to break, our plates. He was the official 
head of our establishment, being technically known as the 
Chief of the Service. He would always receive an order 
with the words *'0n my eye!" and when he knew not how 
to answer us he would say: "What petition shall I 
make?'* He was a youth of twenty or thereabouts, 

1 06 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

espoused to a young person of twelve or thirteen who 
stayed with his mother. The society of neither of these 
ladies seemed to interest him too intensely. He preferred 
to live in the stable with the other boys and the calf. 
He also loved to harden the mouth of the Sah'b's horse. 
And when the time came to work in the garden was he 
most in his element. We finally had to hide 
from him a pruning knife we had obtained from 
Baku, so vastly did he prefer that toy to a 
dishrag or a duster. I can't say that I blamed 
him. He was much slower and 
stupider than is common of his 
quick-witted race; but it took a 
great deal to ruffle his temper, and 
the later we kept him up at night 
the better pleased he apparently 
was. He it was who, during a period of 
interregnum of which I shall have more to 
say, spread the table for the Sah'b's first 
bachelor dinner party with one of the 
Khanum's sheets — and not one of the 
best. Later in the evening, when supple- 
mentary refreshments were served, 1 observed 
that Habib had covered a tray with one of 
the discarded napkins of the dinner table. It 
was not really dirty, he afterward explained, 
and it seemed a pity to risk spoiling a new lace doily! I 
discovered, though, that he was an excellent hand 
at decorating a table. Without any orders he once 
picked to pieces a lot of hyacinths and traced with the 
single flowers so pretty a pattern on the tablecloth that I 
hadn't the heart to affront him by disapproving of it, 

107 




PERSIAN MINIATURES 

though it was a little more finicky than I would have 
chosen for bachelors' hall. So did the genius of his race 
for design come out even in his humble fmgers. On the 
whole, I learned more from him than he did from me — 
as when he would greet us in the morning with " Peace be 
with you/' or politely take the Khanum's keys in both 
hands, or use instead of the first personal pronoun the 
phrase "your slave," or ceremoniously call one aside in 
consultation, saying ''Without trouble, bring your honour 
here,'' or on state occasions serve tea on his knees. And 
he gave one strange glimpses of the world he lived in by 
speaking darkly of jinn, in connection with a friend's 
illness, and by telling us, when a lost watch was found in 
the house, that he had burned candles for its recovery. 

The true head of the service was Mahmad Ali, the cook 
— or Mehm'd Ali as the others called him. Mehm'd Ali 
had been brought up as a butler himself, and an excellent 
one he was, though afflicted with a slight disfigurement of 
the mouth and a stammering of the tongue. But a domes- 
tic crisis had driven him into the kitchen, where he quickly 
learned to make pancakes and cakes much more com- 
plicated as well as he did sauces and curries for pilau — 
which really sounds more like pileu, if you will pronounce it 
in the Italian way. Consequently there were times when 
we were moved to call Mehm'd Ali out of his kitchen and 
say to him, with due ceremony: '* Mehm'd Ali, may your 
hand feel no pain." Your white-capped chef or darkey 
Dinah might not know how to take so cryptic a pronounce- 
ment. But the mitred Mehm'd Ali knew it for the highest 
possible compliment. And being no more than nine- 
teen, though already old enough to have been married 
and divorced, he would hide his blushes in a low bow, stam- 

io8 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

mering in reply: "May honey be to your soul." The 
desire of Mehm'd All's heart was to possess a wrist watch. 
And he served us with a credit that only seldom lapsed 
for the sum of six tomans a month — which is a little less 
than six dollars. 

I am bound to add that Mehm'd Ali would have been 
less clever than he was if he had not made out of us con- 
siderably more than that. For, being cook, he did the 
marketing. I was astounded to fmd telephones in Hama- 
dan, a convenience at that time strange to imperial 
Constantinople. But very few Hamadanis had one. 
We did not, for instance. Neither did any butcher, baker, 
or candlestick-maker with whom we dealt. So there was 
no sitting comfortably at home and ordering what we 
wanted from the Bazaar. Nor did people from the 
Bazaar peddle their wares about the streets to any such 
degree as do the people of the Mediterranean. There is 
no such thing, either, as a delivery cart in Hamadan. 
The thing to do was to go to the Bazaar in person every 
morning after breakfast, and Mehm'd Ali was the person to 
do that thing — Mehm'd Ali and his shagerd, or apprentice. 
This was the youngest member of our juvenile establish- 
ment, a round-faced, bright-eyed, russet-coloured raga- 
mufifm who toted Mehm'd Ali's flexible market basket, 
peeled Mehm'd Ali's potatoes, scoured Mehm'd Ali's 
earthenware pots, and ate Mehm'd Ali's bread. Which 
is to say that Mehm'd Ali engaged and theoretically main- 
tained him, though I suspect that his face would have 
been neither so round nor so rosy had it not been for the 
crumbs from our table. 

Going to the Bazaar was evidently the great affair of 
the day. It was amazing how long it took Mehm'd 

109 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Ali to bargain for the toasted wafers of bread or the 
scarcely thicker flaps of sangak which filled in the chinks 
between Mehm'd Ali's own white loaves, for the eternal 
mutton of the country, for the frequent hare and partridge, 
or francolin, for the white mast which is the Persian ver- 
sion of Dr. Mechnikov's Elixir of Youth, for the famous 
melons of Isfahan that tasted to us like a flatter kind of 
squash, for the dubious bunches of grapes that looked fit 
only /or the scavenger but that had merely begun to turn 
into raisins and really were very good. Beef was far rarer 
than game, vegetables were neither varied nor good unless 
they came out of our own garden, while such rarities as 
fish or strawberries were precious as pounded pearls and 
nightingales' tongues. Certain minute fish, to be sure, 
were indigenous to our neighbourhood; but as the Persians 
catch them by the simple expedient of poisoning the water, 
and sometimes die afterward, we thought twice before 
indulging in them. Once in a while a runner would bring 
to some member of our colony, from a river near Kerman- 
shah or from the faraway Caspian, a real fish, which at 
once became the foundation of a state dinner party. 

Mehm'd Ali was so happy as to possess in addition to 
his other attainments, the art of letters. He accordingly 
kept strict toll of his purchases, rendering an account of 
them every day to the Khanum. There came, however, a 
day of despair when the Khanum temporarily shook off 
from her feet the dust of Hamadan, leaving the hapless 
Chief of the Desert and the Prince All Alone to shift for 
themselves. The Chief of the Desert, being a man of 
affairs, therefore handed over the housekeeping to the 
very incompetent hands of the Prince All Alone. The 
beauty of this arrangement was that the Prince All 

I lO 



PERSIAN APPARATUS 

Alone knew scarcely a word of Persian — despite Habib's 
flattering comment that his progress in it was so rapid as 
to crack the air! Nevertheless, I gravely pretended to 
take Mehm'd Ali's accounts. And when I couldn't get 
it through my thick Firengi head what Mehm'd Ali was 
driving at, Mehm'd Ali would draw little pictures in my 
account book to illustrate his expenditures. Even then I 
sometimes hesitated between an egg and a turnip, or a 
hen and a partridge. 

It was that latter fowl of calamity which at last ruffled 
our relations. The Sah'b one day brought home some 
partridges. It so happened that Mehm'd Ali also bought 
partridges that day; and lo the price of them was twice 
that of the Sah'b's partridges. My vocabulary being too 
limited to do justice to the occasion, the Sah'b took 
Mehm'd Ali over. I don't know whether he called upon 
the washers of the dead to carry Mehm'd Ali out, but he 
named Mehm'd Ali the son of a burnt father, and he 
cast in Mehm'd Ali's teeth that last of all insults : " Mehm'd 
Ali, you have no zeal!" He also docked Mehm'd Ali 
a toman of his pay. The which Mehm'd Ali took very 
much to heart. No cook in Hamadan, he stammered in 
wrath, bought more cheaply than he. 

It chanced that there was to be football that afternoon 
— behold again the Anglo-Saxon in foreign parts — and 
after football the neighbouring Ftrengts were to come to 
us for tea. Cakes, therefore, were to be made, loaves 
baked, samovars lighted, china and silver set forth. When 
I hurried home at the end of the game to receive the 
hungry host, not a cake did I find, not a loaf, not even a 
single servant. Your Anglo-Saxon, however, is not so 
easily stumped. The Ftrengts had their tea, if a little 

II I 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

late and not quite so plenteous as we had planned. But 
the subtle Mehm'd Ali, although he had not blackened 
our faces to the degree he hoped, after all made his point. 
He knew, and we knew, and each of us knew the other 
knew, that another cook capable of making both pilau 
and pancakes was not to be picked up in Hamadan — 
outside of some one else's kitchen. For the sake of the 
greater good, therefore, we that day learned the lesson 
of not insisting upon a lesser. And the next day Mehm'd 
Ali treated us to quite the most magnificent chocolate 
cake in his repertory. When we looked at it our mouths 
watered. When we tasted it we sent for Mehm'd Ali. 

"Mehm'd Ali," said the Sah'b in all gravity, "may your 
hand feel no pain." 

"Sah'b," replied Mehm'd Ali, "may honey be to your 
soul." 

And do you know? Partridges grew a little cheaper — 
after that! 



112 



VIII 

JIMMY & CO. 

His star is a strange one ! one that leadeth him to fortune by 
the path of frowns ! to greatness by the aid of thwackings ! Truly 
the ways of Allah are wonderful ! 

George Meredith: the shaving of shagpat 

LADIES and gentlemen, I have the honour to pre- 
sent to you Mr. James — not Henry. Jimmy, 
the ladies and the gentlemen — if any have suc- 
-^ ceeded in wading so far into our long-winded 
book. 

This introduction is necessary to sketch our household 
in its true colours, not only because our dog is so im- 
portant a member of our family, but because he is so 
admirable a proof of the saving inconsistency of human 
nature. For if there be a creature which a Persian is 
more unwilling to touch than a pig or a Christian, that 
creature is a dog. An orthodox Persian, especially if he 
be elderly and turbaned, will do anything to avoid 
shaking hands with us or drinking our impure tea. But 
if Jimmy chances to touch so much as the hem of his 
garment, the only remedy is to go straight to the bath, 
take off his turban, and jump into the ''treasury.'' And 
about the water of that treasury I have already told you, 
or insinuated to you, something. Yet mark the subtle- 
ties of orthodoxy when I also tell you that Jimmy, in 

113 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

spite of the double disadvantage under which he suffers 
by being in all literalness a Christian dog, finds favour in 
many an Iranian eye. Although in the prime of life he 
falsely passes, by reason of his diminutive stature, the 
curliness of his hair, and the affability of his manners, 
for a tuleh, a puppy. Now a puppy is justly exempted 
in Persia from the full-grown depravity of a sag, or dog. 
So our house-boys pet Jimmy outrageously. And when- 
ever he goes out with us I notice that he is far more likely 
to draw admiring than disgusted glances, however indis- 
creetly he may sniff about the feet of the faithful. 

Discretion, I fear, was never Jimmy's strong point. 
Where he was born I do not know, but his character is 
all of the quixotic island from which Irish terriers spring. 
He is a handsome little gentleman — I used the word ad- 
visedly — with a white coat which he finds none too easy 
to keep unspotted from the world, with a black patch on 
one quizzically uplifted ear, with a humorous eye. It 
twinkles, does that eye, like every eye of Erin, like the 
eyes of all who are irresistible to the softer sex and who 
most savour the relish of adventure. Jimmy is the best 
of companions, lively, affectionate, sympathetic, always 
ready for the unexpected, enduring misadventure without 
a whimper. He is not deficient, either, in the more home- 
spun qualities of gratitude and respect for authority. 
But, devoted as he is to us, he finds our house too small 
and our garden too narrow a field for his inquiring and 
democratic spirit. We are domestic and sedentary while 
he is debonair, irresponsible, a bit of a boulevardier. To 
be out o' nights is what he adores. While I will not liken 
him to the ill knight in Malory, who went about dis- 
tressing and destroying all ladies, I fear Jimmy is not 

114 



JIMMY & CO. 

above forming unhallowed ties. And in the pursuit of 
them he has a way of disappearing for hours, for days. 
What is most affecting, however, is to see the prodigal 
come home from these absences with the darkness of dis- 
illusion in that normally twinkling eye, very much 
chastened in spirit, knowing perfectly well what reproaches 
will be heaped upon him, yet taking our hard words, per-: 
chance our heartless chastisements, with a comprehend- 
ing and heroic resignation. 

One of these mysterious disappearances lasted so long 
that we suspected abduction. And the more so as two 
days after Jimmy's departure the servants tried to con- 
sole us by producing a greyhound somebody wanted to 
sell. Wherein is exemplified anew the Persian inconsist- 
ency with regard to dogs. A ta:ii, a greyhound, occupies 
the same privileged position as a puppy. Nothing is 
commoner than for a country gentleman to maintain a 
kennel of greyhounds, that he may course hare and gazelle 
withal. This particular greyhound, like most of the 
others I saw in Persia, was as a matter of fact a brown- 
hound. He had long, silky brown hair, with a slight crimp 
in it like a Russian wolfhound, and absurdly flapping 
ears. The Sah'b, to the immense disapproval of the 
house-boys, sardonically named him Ferda, which means 
To-morrow. For that word of hope occupies as large a 
place in the Persian vocabulary as it does in the Spanish. 
As for me, the droop of the newcomer's ears, the colour 
of his locks, and his hysterical manner, reminded me so 
strongly of a well-known portrait of the authoress of 
"Aurora Leigh" at the time of her marriage, that I could 
only call him Mrs. Browning, In short, we all looked 
coldly upon him, being too faithful to the lost dog of our 

115 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

hearts. Moreover, Mrs. Browning's excessive sensibility 
disgusted us. He regarded the most indifferent gesture 
as a personal menace, and was forever cringing and yelp- 
ing. His one virtue was that he could run. How he 
could run, though ! We coursed with him once or twice, 
and that crimped bundle of nerves actually caught us the 
makings of a jugged hare. But when Mrs. Browning 
finally made use of his unique gift to run away, all we re- 
gretted about him was the toman or two we had paid for 
so poor a creature. 

Jimmy, in the meantime, failed to come back. So 
Habib made one day a second attempt at consolation by 
proudly bringing in a bird which he named a hawk. 
Falconry is by no means a lost art in this part of the world, 
where hunting Khans keep their hawks and their falconers 
quite like any baron of the thirteenth century. But this 
hawk, while he consumed chunks of raw meat with the 
utmost greediness, happened to be an owl, with two im- 
mense yellow eyes that blinked blindly at us as he stum- 
bled about the brick floor of the veranda! And to the 
infinite disappointment of Habib we refused to add him 
to our already large enough list of pensioners. 

Among these was an obscurer member whom I have 
not yet mentioned, belonging to the pariah caste of sag. 
Where he came from nobody knew. Nor did we take 
very kindly to him at first, the more so as the meat bill 
took a turn for the worse about that time. But as often 
as we ordered him away he infallibly turned up again, 
generally in the vicinity of the stable. Incidentally the 
boys kept hinting that dwellers in the desert required 
some sort of watchman. Many a dark word threw 
they out as well about wolves that ravened down from the 

ii6 



JIMMY & CO. 

mountains on winter nights, plainly giving us to under- 
stand that nobody could keep the wolf from the door, or 
protect our slumbers, to say nothing of their own, better 
than this humble citizen of the country. So what did it 
avail us to kick against the pricks? We gave in, without 
admitted surrender or triumph on either side, and before 
we knew it the sag was on terms of familiarity with us all. 
He received, of course, none of Jimmy's honours. He 
never came into the house, being nothing but a plain 
yaller dog, rather bigger and redder than the ordinary, 
with a pair of clipped ears that gave him a vague distinc- 
tion. But I noticed that Mehm'd Ali's rosy-cheeked ap- 
prentice was not too far gone in the canons of the orthodox 
to take the interloper into his arms or even to treat him to 
surreptitious kisses. 

At last it began to be whispered that the powers of the 
air were against us, for the new watch-dog proceeded to 
develop a mysterious malady. He would twitch spas- 
modically at inopportune moments, and most dolorously 
would he howl in season and out. These symptoms, Habib 
explained, were due to the fact that an enemy, probably a 
thief who had set apart our house for some midnight foray, 
had fed the unfortunate creature with a piece of bread or 
a lump of meat containing an insidious needle. The needle, 
of course, had stuck in the dog's throat, and was the cause 
of his woe. Whether the needle was finally fatal to him, 
or whether, as the servants vowed, the implacable robber 
shot him, we never knew. At any rate, he, too, disap- 
peared, and another reigned in his stead. This was a ter- 
rifying animal, bigger and yellower, without the distin- 
guished ears, who at once made himself so much at home 
that he at first resisted all our attempts to get into or out 

117 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

of the garden. We stuck to the point, however, and he 
ended by grudgingly recognising our rights. 

But, Jimmy still stayed away — as we felt convinced, in a 
state of captivity. Yet when two or three months had 
gone by we gave him up as gone for good. Then one of 
the house-boys confided to us — we suspected because his 
tenure of office had become a little insecure — that his 
mother, while paying a call, had seen in the garden of her 
hostess a white puppy. Obscure as this clew was, we could 
not but follow it up. And it led to a deed of high-handed- 
ness which enlightened me not a little on some of the ways 
of Persia. For before we knew it we were told that the 
son of the lady in whose garden a white puppy had been 
seen had been captured by our retinue, and was held in the 
stable at our disposal as a hostage! 

There is this beauty about justice in Persia, that every- 
body administers it to suit himself. There exist in Hama- 
dan municipal dungeons, gendarmerie prisons, and Black 
Holes of Calcutta in the Governor's palace, wherein 
lie in chains the more notorious malefactors of the 
province. But in general people fmd it simpler and 
more satisfactory to attend to a private enemy them- 
selves — when they can catch him. No great Khan, for 
instance, would dream of carrying on his affairs without 
shutting up his villagers whenever he chooses. And 
sometimes he shuts up another Khan's villagers. Even 
in a certain Firengi office known to me have I seen an 
upper chamber reserved for the entertainment of recalci- 
trant rug weavers who eat up the money advanced them 
for wool and dyes. There they sit, not too uncomfortably, 
nourished at the expense of the Firengi, and no doubt more 
richly than they are used, until their friends produce the 

ii8 



JIMMY & CO. 

money or give satisfactory bond that the rug will be com- 
pleted according to contract. It is the custom of the 
country, and nobody objects to it — unless possibly the 
weaver. And he always has the recourse of taking bast 
at one of the mosques or sacred tombs which in every 
town are an asylum not to be violated even by the Shah. 
So the boy whom the servants suspected of knowing too 
much about Jimmy was locked up with the cow until the 
Sah'b was ready for him. The Sah'b was ready for him 
after dinner. Into the library the prisoner was accord- 
ingly dragged, an extremely ragged and dejected looking 
urchin, who was not too dejected to cast a curious eye 
upon the strange contrivances whereon we perched, to say 
nothing of the counterfeit presentment of Lucrezia 
Crivelli. Being put through the third degree, the prisoner 
first declared that he knew nothing about any puppy what- 
soever. - Under pressure he then admitted that he had 
chanced to catch sight at Sheverin, three miles out of 
town, far away from his mother's garden, a puppy. But 
it was not a white puppy with black spots. It was a 
yellow puppy with no spots at all. And no amount of 
subtle suggestion could make him endow that puppy with 
curls or give any account of its origin, history, or habits. 
What the bastinado might have brought forth I do not 
know. If one happens to lack the proper appliances 
for beating a man on the soles of his bare feet, or if one 
dislikes the commotion which that treatment usually 
brings forth, one can always hire the police to do it. And 
the better you tip the policeman the more stripes will he 
administer. In that respect, however, we did not follow 
the customs of the country. We merely threatened to, 
and let our helpless victim go back to the stable with his 

119 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

captors. There they all spent the night sociably under 
the same kursi, and the next morning the victim departed 
in peace about his own unholy affairs. 

We had quite given up hope of ever seeing Jimmy again 
when he was brought back one day by a policeman who 
flatly refused to say where he had found him. Alas, poor 
Jimmy! Never have I seen a humbler little dog. Of 
course he knew us. He could not have forgotten us. We 
saw it in his half-averted eye. But we also saw that he 
entertained no hope of forgiveness. What was most 
pitiful, however, were the marks of chafmg around his 
neck, the wounds on his head, and the unutterable dirti- 
ness of his once white coat. So we killed — well, not a 
fatted calf for him, since that would have transgressed the 
laws of the Medes and the Persians. We let him gobble 
up more chops and chicken bones than were good for him, 
though, and he was nearly gobbled up in turn, out of 
jealousy, by the common or garden sag who had taken the 
place of his old friend the yellow cur with a needle in his 
throat. And it was not long before Jimmy became as 
handsome and humorous as ever, and a firm friend of 
the hard-hearted watch-dog. 

But did that escapade cure him of running away? Of 
course not! Can Jimmy change his spots, or the Ethio- 
pian his skin? 



I20 



IX 

THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

The Passion Play at Ammergau, with its immense audiences, 
the seriousness of its actors, the passionate emotion of its specta- 
tors, brought to my mind something of which I had read an ac- 
count lately; something produced, not in Bavaria or Christendom 
at all, hut far away in that wonderful East, from which, whatever 
airs of superiority Europe may justly give itself, all our religion 
has come, and where religion, of some sort or other, has still an 
empire over men s feelings such as it has nowhere else. 

Matthew Arnold: essays in criticism 



WE HAD been in Hamadan barely a week 
when, one afternoon as we went about on 
a round of calls, we met a file of small 
boys who did not conceal their disposition 
to hoot at us. One could hardly blame them. Of all 
human employments, that of disseminating pasteboards 
has always seemed to me the most impossible to take 
seriously. What further attracted me to the small boys, 
however, was a toy flagstaff they were playing with, flying 
a three-cornered green rag and tipped with a piece of tin 
cut into the silhouette of an open hand. And that night 
or the next as we came home from a dinner party we 
passed several lighted mosque windows, wide-pointed 
arches filled with white paper and crisscrossed by heavy 

121 




THE FLAGELLANTS 



122 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

wooden bars, behind which we could hear sounds of 
chanting, interrupted by curious single volleys of clapping. 

"Hello!'' exclaimed one of my companions. *'Is it 
Moharrem already?'* 

It was Moharrem already. Moharrem is the first month 
of the Mohammedan year, which as everybody knows is 
a lunar year and therefore walks backward through the 
seasons. So don't imagine that if the first of Moharrem 
fell on November 30th in 191 3, it will continue with the 
monotony of our own calendar to fall on November 30th. 
On the contrary, as it turns up eleven days or so earlier 
every twelvemonth, it will not return to that part of 
the year until 1946 — and then will probably hit another 
date. 

However, even outside of Persia I had seen enough of 
what Persians do in Moharrem to look forward with vast 
interest to what they might do here. 

II 

The month of Moharrem means far more to the people 
of Iran than it does to their co-religionists in other coun- 
tries, for reasons which I shall have to take a little time 
to explain. We have heard a good deal of late of Pan- 
Islamism, Holy Wars, and what not; but those who say 
most about these things say very little about the fact that 
the Arabs, the Turks, the Turkomans, and the Afghans 
on one side, and the Persians and most of the Moham- 
medan Indians, on the other, love each other about as 
much as Queen Elisabeth and the Pope used to, or the 
Spaniards and the Dutch. For aside from questions of 
race, language, and so forth, the Mohammedan world is 
divided against itself on a religious question which the 

123 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Persians take much more to heart than any of their 
neighbours. 

When the Prophet died in 632, he left no explicit direc- 
tions as to his successor in the leadership of the new 
theocratic state he had founded. It had, to be sure, 
been more or less vaguely understood that his mantle 
would fall upon his cousin and son-in-law Ali. Tl;is 
Ali, gloriously known as the Lion of God, had been after 
the Prophet's first wife, Mother of the Moslems (on whom 
be peace!), the Prophet's first convert. Ali had also 
married the Prophet's daughter Fatma, by whom he had 
two sons. These two, Hasan and Hosein, were the sole 
surviving male descendants of the Prophet, who had 
pronounced their father his son, his vicar, and his delegate. 
And the Persians claim that during Mohammed's fare- 
well pilgrimage to Mecca the archangel Gabriel appeared 
to him, instructing him to proclaim Ali as his legal suc- 
cessor, and that on his way back to Medina the Prophet 
did so. 

Be that as it may, there was enough indefiniteness with 
regard to his intentions for the Arabs to elect as the first 
Caliph or temporal successor of Mohammed another 
member of his family, his father-in-law Abu Bekr. This 
Abu Bekr — otherwise Father of the Full Moon, or of 
Mohammed's youngest wife Aishah — was succeeded in 
634 by Omar, who ten years later met a violent end; and 
after him came Osman or Othman, assassinated in turn 
in 6^6. Then only did Ali, no longer a young man, who 
had hitherto been accorded merely a vague spiritual 
primacy, inherit the temporal power as fourth Caliph. 
In the twenty-four years since the Prophet's death, how- 
ever, the new Mohammedan state had grown so rapidly 

124 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

that to the parent province of Arabia had already been 
added Syria, Egypt, and Persia. It was a state of im- 
perial size, and the Lion of God proved not to be of the 
temper of an emperor. Dissensions accordingly arose 
between him and the warlike governors of Egypt and 
Syria, which certain fanatics undertook to settle by stab- 
bing the three of them and holding a new election. But 
this praiseworthy project was successful only in the case 
of Ali. He was killed in 66 1 at Kufa, a town of that 
Mesopotamian region known in the Near East as Irak 
Arabi. The Caliphate then passed to Ali's elder son 
Hasan, who soon abdicated in favour of Moavia, gover- 
nor of Syria and founder of the Ommayad dynasty of 
Damascus. Hasan retired to the holy city of Medina, 
where about 669 he was poisoned by one of his numerous 
wives. 

When Moavia died in 680, the people of Kufa sent 
word to Ali's second son Hosein, who also lived in Medina, 
that they would recognise him as the new Caliph instead 
of Moavia's son Yezid. Yezid, however, lost no time in 
taking steps to secure his own succession. When Hosein 
arrived at Kufa with his family and a small retinue the 
gates were closed against him, and he was surrounded by a 
vastly superior force under the command of Amr ibn 
Saad, the conqueror of Egypt. Seeing himself betrayed 
and hopelessly outnumbered, Hosein asked permission 
of Amr to return in safety to Medina, or even to proceed 
to Yezid's court at Damascus. This parley was cut 
short by Obeidullah ibn Ziad, the governor of Kufa just 
appointed by Yezid, who sent his lieutenant Shimr to 
insist that Amr demand Hosein's unconditional surrender 
or resign his command. Hosein refused to surrender. 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

In spite of the odds against him, he took up his position 
on the hillock of Kerbela, above the Euphrates, and pre- 
pared for battle. This was on the ninth day of Mohar- 
rem, in the year of the Hegira 6i, or 68i of our era. 

History and legend are so intertwined in the story 
that the forces of the Arabs from Medina are variously 
reported to have been from seventy to six hundred men, 
horse and foot, while those of the Syrian cavalry amounted 
to four or five thousand. The chief Al Hurr, who had 
first intimated to Hosein that the gates of Kufa would 
not open to him, now went over to the latter with his 
brother, his son, and one of his slaves. So small a rein- 
forcement, however, naturally had no effect on the final 
outcome. After a heroic resistance of two days, during 
which the beleaguered Arabs had also to fight against 
sun and thirst, Hosein alone remained alive of the men 
of his party. At nightfall of the loth of Mohan em he 
was shot in the mouth by an arrow, while attempting to 
get water from the Euphrates. His sister Zeineb, rush- 
ing out from her tent, adjured the Syrians to spare the 
grandson of the Prophet. But their answer was to set the 
camp on fire and to strike down Hosein under thirty-three 
swords and lances. His head was then cut off by Shimr 
who, according to the historian Masudi, carried the bloody 
trophy to his chief Obeidullah, chanting exultingly: 

''Cover me with gold and with silver to my stirrups. 

For I have killed the Seid of the veiled face. 

I have slain the most noble of men by his father and his mother, 

The most noble when they produce titles of nobility." 

The governor of Kufa sent the head, together with the 
women and children of Hosein's family, to Yezid at 

126 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

Damascus. And Masudi adds that the cruel Caliph 
further mutilated with his staff the head of his rival, until 
rebuked by an old man who said: ''Often have I seen the 
lips of the Prophet joined to those lips in a kiss/' 

These events are what the Persians and other Shiites, 
or schismatics, commemorate during the month of Mo- 
han em. It is for them a month of mourning, during 
which they wear black or otherwise display signs of grief, 
and neither weddings nor other festivities take place in 
those thirty days. For the Persians, however, it is not 
only a religious matter. Their history is longer and more 
glorious than that of the Arabs, by whom they were con- 
quered during the Caliphate of Omar. Mesopotamia 
was a Persian province until the second Caliph captured 
Ctesiphon in 637. Four years later his army swept through 
the very passes which the Turks and the Russians have 
lately brought back to the notice of the world, and by 
the battle of Nehavend, some fifty miles south of Hama- 
dan, the last of the Sasanian kings was finally defeated 
and the greater part of Persia fell into their hands. This 
blow to the national pride is perhaps the chief reason why 
the Persians deny the validity of the Caliphate. Not 
only do they refuse to recognise the first three Caliphs 
— or any of the others, for that matter — but they execrate 
them, and Omar in particular, with a zeal which to the 
Arabs and the Turks is the height of blasphemy. ''O 
God, curse Omar! Then Abu Bekr and Omar! Then 
Osman and Omar! Then Omar! Then Omar!" is an 
imprecation often and solemnly repeated by the Shii'tes 
to the horror of all true Sunnite or orthodox Moham- 
medans. The Persians also celebrate the anniversary 
of the assassination of Omar (may his name be cursed!) 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

with the greater zest because he was stabbed by a Persian 
slave. And one of the ways by which they still mark that 
day of rejoicing is to burn the hated Caliph in eifigy. 

The case is the more curious because the conquest of 
Omar all but put an end to Zoroastrianism. Only in 
southeastern Persia and in Bombay do there remain a 
few adherents of this ancient faith. But the Persians 
fiercely contend that Ali and his descendants alone were 
the true successors of the Prophet. The tombs of Ali 
and Hosein at Nejef and Kerbela, in Mesopotamia, are 
to them places of pilgrimage almost if not quite as sacred 
as Mecca and Medina. Other members of the holy family 
are buried at Kazimein and Samarra, north of Baghdad, 
while in their own country the Persians venerate at Me- 
shed the tomb of the eighth of the descendants of the 
Prophet, Riza. In all there were twelve of these per- 
sonages, who are known as the Imams. They are re- 
garded as more than mortals, whose natures were without 
sin and whose bodies cast no shadow. The last one 
disappeared in 873; and although a tomb of him exists at 
Samarra the Persians believe that he never died, but will 
reappear in the great mosque of Meshed at the Judgment 
Day as the Mahdi or Guide. 

Another element of nationality enters into the legend 
of Hosein in that the Persians devoutly believe his wife, 
Harar or 0mm Leila, to have been the daughter of Yez- 
digird III, the last of the Sasanians. According to Per- 
sian history as set forth by Firdeusi, in the Shah Nameh, 
this second national dynasty was descended from the 
earlier mythical dynasty which has partially been iden- 
tified with the Achaemenians of the heroic period. The 
story is that the Persian princess was carried away to 

128 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

Medina as a prisoner of war, where Omar (may his name 
be cursed !) ordered her to be sold as a slave but AH inter- 
vened and gave her to his son Hosein. And, similarly, 
the Persians trace the ancestry of the Safevi dynasty, 
which restored the independence of Persia in 1499, to 
the seventh Imam, Musa Kazim. Thus the ceremonies 
of Moharrem are, it is true, a rite of the religion which 
took the place of their own more ancient one. But they 
are at the same time an assertion of national pride against 
the Arab conqueror and against those Turkish and Afghan 
neighbours who have so often encroached on Persian soil. 
Time, of course, has a way of softening religious dissen- 
sions. When, however, they are so intricately entangled 
with others of the sentiments that lie deepest in the heart 
of man, it is not safe to count too much on the unity of 
the Moslem world. At any rate, the Persians still piously 
chant in Moharrem: 

'The black-hearted people who slew the offspring of the 
Prophet with malice: 

'They claim to belong to the religion, but they murder the 
lord of the religion." 

Ill 

Although it had for several days been patent that some- 
thing was in the air, the first positive sign of it we had in 
our own house. Then the servants, who had unaccount- 
ably been going about with their clothes unbuttoned at 
the throat, announced that as it was the day of the Little 
Slaughter, otherwise the seventh of Moharrem, they 
would be obliged to do as little work as possible. This, I 
must confess, seemed no new resolution in those pictur- 

129 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

esque underlings, no one of whom ever gave us the im- 
pression that he would die of overwork. But an inquisitive 
ear could not help being caught by that name of Little 
Slaughter — which I believe is the anniversary of the day 
when the Imam Hosein and his party were turned aside 
from Kufa by the chief Al Hurr. 

I afterward realised that if I had known Persian, or if 
I had been an older resident of Hamadan, I might have 
seen a great deal more than I did. But there was some- 
thing even for the most ignorant newcomer to see on the 
tenth of Moharrem. This greatest anniversary of the 
Persian year is known as the Great Slaughter. And it is 
commemorated throughout the country by a species of 
Passion Play which has a more familiar counterpart in the 
Easter celebrations of the Greek Church, as in the dramatic 
representations of Oberammergau and other parts of the 
Catholic world. In Tehran and elsewhere theatres exist, 
or are improvised, in which the tragedy of the Family of 
the Tent, as the Persians name the heroic campers at 
Kerbela, is acted out with more than historical detail. 
I presume some such thing might have been found in 
Hamadan, though no one of our colony had ever seen it. 
One of our number, indeed, was highly scandalised that 
Christians should betray any interest in proceedings so 
heathenish. We did, however, see something. And in its 
way it was something stranger and more picturesque than 
I had ever seen before. 

We saw it from the roof of a building that had been 
erected for a "movie" theatre! The inner workings of 
that theatre remained immovable during the whole of 
my sojourn in Hamadan ; but no film that has since been 
exhibited there can have come up to the setting and the 

130 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

scene on which we, in company with not a few of the peo- 
ple of the country, looked down. Immediately below us 
ran a.^orizontal street, opening in front of our high gallery 
into an irregular square. The right side of it was bounded 
by a series of broken vaults and arches which go by the 
name of Masjid-i-Shah — being, some one told me, all 
that is left of a mosque begun there about a hundred years 
ago by Fat'h Ali Shah. The mud walls of the Bazaar 
enclosed the rest of the uneven amphitheatre. Behind it, 
bearing rather toward the left, rose a few tiers of fiat adobe 
roofs, while farther away toward the right, where the river 
made a hollow in the clay-coloured town, we could see in 
the northwest the white glitter of the plain. There was 
snow, too, on every projecting bit of roof or masonry, 
contrasting vividly with the dark masses of spectators 
that lined all the nearer roofs and the outer edges of the 
square. This note of black and white was decoratively 
repeated by groups of women who stood together on two 
mounds facing the square and at two points on either side 
of it, the white triangles of their veils and the white fillets 
encircling their crowns cut out against the black or dark 
blue of their loose domino. And there were plenty of 
white turbans above dark robes to carry the impression 
a little farther. 

I do not mean to pretend that there was any lack of 
colour on this open-air stage roofed with so intense a blue. 
But what was most striking about the look of the crowd 
was its general soberness of tone. There were none of the 
brilliant reds and yellows which the Turks love. The pre- 
vailing black and brown of the men's costumes was varied 
by dull blues and greens, with only an occasional touch of 
russet, buff, or salmon. All the more conspicuous, there- 

131 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

fore, was a fantastic little spangled green pavillion that 
stood at the rear of the rising stage. This was supposed 
to represent Damascus, or Yezid's palace therein. A 
less ornamental red tent downstage at the right was at 
once Kufa and the camp of the villains Amr and Shimr. 
In the centre and toward the left of the stage were pitched 
two smaller white tents, for the camp of Kerbela. 

All this made enough to look at, in the clear Persian 
sunlight, till a strange object suddenly advanced into sight 
behind the ruins of the mosque. It looked like a furled 
standard, horizontally striped with brilliant bands of 
colour, and its tall staff was surmounted by an upright 
hand of brass. According to Habib this hand commemo- 
rated the mutilated one of the Imam Abu Fazl, though 
Masudi says in ''The Meadows of Gold" that Shimr cut 
off the right hand of Hosein as well as his head. And I 
believe a hand is a common symbol of the Holy Family 
of Islam, whose five chief members are Mohammed, 
Fatma, Ali, Hasan, and Hosein. At any rate, this pic- 
turesque furled standard, which is not meant to be un- 
furled, being merely a sort of circular gonfalon, presently 
reached the end of the street below us. It was followed 
by a quantity of decorative banners on shorter staves. 
Some of them were black, others were fringed and in- 
scribed with Arabic letters, while two triangular oriflammes 
were made to stand straight out by being fastened together 
at the point. Behind the banners clattered a cavalcade 
of men at arms, some in scarlet, others carrying long, slen- 
der lances. And after them marched a company of men 
on foot. What was most unusual about the latter was 
not that they wore black, but that they were bare-headed. 
For to uncover the hair in public is the last thing for a 

132 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

Mohammedan to do. These beat their bare breasts in 
unison, as they marched. Which instantly made me 
recognise, in the irregular measured thud of right hands on 
left shoulder blades, the curious sound of clapping I had 
heard behind the lighted paper windows of the mosques. 

This procession passed under us and took its place at 
Kerbela, on the left side of the square. Next there ap- 
peared a band of water carriers, each with a goatskin 
slung across his back and swinging in his hand a hollow 
gourd or an oblong brass bowl. The patron of this guild 
is the standard bearer Abbas, the Imam's uncle, who was 
killed in a desperate attempt to bring to the beleaguered 
women and children at Kerbela a little water from the 
Euphrates. Behind the water carriers trotted a car- 
avan of travellers from Medina, on mule back. The 
most notable thing about them was their luggage, con- 
sisting of funny little painted trunks and the most enviable 
saddlebags. They took their places immediately below 
us, facing the square. And after them came more banners 
and flagellants. Their leader, who bore the tall furled 
and banded gonfalon, jerked it up and down in a sort of 
rhythm, and the flagellants hopped in time to it, beating 
their breasts and chanting ''Hosein ah!'' This commo- 
tion so alarmed one of the mules of the caravan that he 
upset his unlucky rider, together with his boxes and 
saddlebags, into a sea of mud. 

There was quite an interval before a larger and more 
picturesque procession made its appearance. It emerged 
from the Bazaar at the left, as if to emphasize its distinc- 
tion from the party of Hosein, and for greater pomp it was 
preceded by two lines of gendarmes. This touch had a 
special savour for some of us, in that those gendarmes were 

133 



PERSIAN MINIATURES . 

the creation of our own compatriot Mr. W. M. Shuster, 
ex-Treasurer-General of Persia. This more magnificent 
Syrian procession flaunted several furled gonfalons of the 
brass hand, and many more banners and oriflammes. 
They were followed by the cavaliers and lancers of Amr 
ibn Saad, and by a caravan of camels. The riders of the 
latter were dressed in the Syrian cloak and scarf, while the 
trappings of their beasts were far more gorgeous than 
anything displayed by the humble mules from Medina. 
And next appeared a most mysterious ornament or emblem 
that advanced glittering above the heads of the crowd. 
On top of the pole that carried it was a cross bar, and at 
either end of the cross bar some little domed and pin- 
nacled edifice of brass, while between them stood upright, 
its point nodding forward as if by its own weight, what 
might have been a sword of slenderest steel. What this 
signified, if anything, no one could tell me. But I forgot 
to wonder about it when I saw who edged next into sight, 
bare-headed like the breast-beaters, but dressed in white 
smocks, commemorating the shroud worn by Hosein at 
Kerbela, that were streaked scarlet with their own blood. 
They marched sideways in two long lines, the left hand of 
each in the belt of his neighbour, holding in his right a 
sword with which he slashed his own head. A few of those 
extraordinary flagellants I had seen before, in Constanti- 
nople. But there it was in an enclosed courtyard, at dusk, 
among an unfriendly people. Here in the brilliant sun- 
light of their own country, pressed by their friends and 
neighbours, chanting so hoarsely after that mysterious 
thing of brass and steel that glittered above the dark 
caps of the crowd, they made an effect wilder and more 
frenetic than anything I have ever seen. Many of them 

134 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

were no more than boys. And a few of them carried 
babies in their arms, whose little heads they had scratched 
in one or two places to expiate the blood of the martyred 
Hosein. Such wounds, the Persians say, are not as other 
wounds; for the Prophet miraculously heals them. I 
must add that several of the men wore white skull caps, 
while others seemed to take care how far they swung their 
swords. Even so, however, those white smocks were 
gruesomely reddened, and for days afterward bandaged 
heads walked about Hamadan. 

The banners gathered in a mass of colour below us at 
the right, near the red tent of Kufa. The flagellants made 
for Kerbela, forming a great ring in front of Hosein's tent 
at the left. The camels from Damascus ranged in front 
of the mules from Medina. As for the lancers of the 
conqueror of Egypt, they disappointed me by curveting 
out of sight behind the ruined vaults. But they soon 
reappeared upstage through an arch. So the arena was 
now completely set. And I fear that many things passed 
upon it which escaped our eyes. One reason was that 
we were, after all, rather far away^as it were among the 
gallery gods. Another was that in spite of policemen 
armed with whips and walking barricades made up of 
two men and a long pole, the spectators incessantly en- 
croached upon the stage; and what looked like a friendly 
conversation between two citizens of Hamadan might really 
be a proud parley between Hosein and Amr of Egypt. 
Presently, however, there took place an unmistakable piece 
of action, when the hosts of Syria charged those of Arabia. 
I must confess that my eye was not sharp enough to detect 
any casualties. But when the two armies had withdrawn 
to their respective sides of the field, I suddenly discovered 

135 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

a lifeless body lying on the ground not far from the central 
tent. 

An Arab hurried out of the tent of Hosein and knelt 
beside the corpse, followed by a woman who burst into 
loud sobs. Who could the dead man be? Was he the 
standard bearer Abbas? Was he Ali Akbar, the Imam's 
son, who also lost his life in an attempt to get water from 
the Euphrates? Was he the young Kasim, Hosein's 
nephew, whose story is one of the most affecting incidents 
in the Persian legend? Kasim was, I believe, the fifth 
to volunteer for the perilous adventure of bringing water 
from the river, during those two burning days under 
the Mesopotamian sun. He was only sixteen years old, 
and both his mother and his uncle did their best to dis- 
suade him. But the matter was finally settled by the dis- 
covery of a letter or will of his father, the Caliph Hasan, 
prophesying for him the glory of martyrdom and directing 
that he was first to marry his cousin Zobeida. The wed- 
ding accordingly took place on the battlefield. But if 
it took place at Masjid-i-Shah 1 saw nothing of it — unless 
a second encounter between the two troops of cavaliers 
was the attack which broke up the marriage festivities 
and cost the life of the young bridegroom. 

At the close of this melee the Syrians held the field. 
Whereupon they set on fire the central tent, which was 
supposed to shelter the Imam's Persian princess, his 
sister Zelneb, the young widow Zobeida, the widow of 
Hasan, and other women and children. This sudden 
blaze in the centre of the square, made more spectacular 
by a quantity of straw concealed in the burning tent, 
was the signal for a passionate outburst of weeping from 
the crowd. There had been tears and sobs before, es- 

136 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

pecially when the corpse was left on the ground at the 
end of the first brush between the lancers. But now there 
arose so general a sound of grief that one could not help 
being impressed. Near us sat a Persian lady who had first 
been extremely scandalised by the loose way in which the 
men and women of our party sat together, and who then 
had shown every sign of uneasiness lest her skirts be de- 
filed by those of the missionary next her — the more so 
as a wet Christian is far more impure than a dry one. 
This evidently orthodox person was one of the first to 
shed tears over the perils of the Family of the Tent. They 
were real tears, because I saw them splash down her 
cheeks. She was not so orthodox, I must add, but what 
she lifted her thick veil in order to see what was going 
on. And now not only did her tears shower anew, but 
she beat her breast, tore her hair, and very nearly jerked 
her veil off altogether. Even so impure an unbeliever as 
myself could not help feeling touched at such evidence 
that a tragedy over twelve hundred years old could still 
work so powerfully upon the hearts of those who beheld 
it. Then the weeping lady suddenly dried her tears and 
demanded of another lady in a black domino, rather 
crossly, why she didn't cry. And having received what 
was no doubt a satisfactory answer, the tears began to 
rain again out of her own better disciplined eyes. At 
that, I must admit, I, who am naturally of a suspicious 
nature, began to dart sceptical glances about me. I 
remembered that at the theatre of the Passion Play in 
Tehran there is a functionary known as the Auxiliary of 
Tears. I went so far as to ask myself if there could be 
onions in any of the innumerable handkerchiefs I saw. 
But it opportunely came back to me that this was at 

137 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

once a religious and dramatic performance, in a land where 
other dramatic performances do not exist, that I myself 
had more than once nearly drowned in the tears of my 
own compatriots, shed over no greater a matter, for in- 
stance, than "The Music Master,'' and that if I chose 
that moment to probe the dark subject of female lamen- 
tations I would miss what was going forward in the square 
of Masjid-i-Shah. 

The flames of the tent were put out by the water car- 
riers, who drew from their goatskins the water of the 
Euphrates which Hosein and his companions had so bit- 
terly lacked. In the meantime the flagellants in black 
made a circle about the place of the tent, beating their 
breasts more vehemently than ever, striking their heads 
in despair, and showering on their heads what remained 
of the half-burnt straw of the tent, as well as fresh-chopped 
straw from a supply they had — representing the sands of 
Mesopotamia. 

By the time the last scene was ready to take place the 
crowd had burst all bounds, filling the amphitheatre 
with an uneasy mass of dark felt caps. Through it the 
flagellants in black slowly made their way, led by the 
mysterious brass emblem, to the standards massed near 
the red tent of Amr ibn Saad. The flagellants in white 
followed them, with their flying guard of pointed ori- 
flammes. Then the scarlet lancers and the Syrian camels 
— one of them, splendidly caparisoned, mounted by a 
personage in green, and others bearing aloft the captive 
women and children from Medina, with wooden triangles 
about their necks — performed a serpentine progress 
through the crowd from Kufa to Damascus. At Ober- 
ammergau, of course, there never would have been such 

138 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

disorder or properties so primitive. But at Oberammer- 
gau, with all its precision and solemnity, there never could 
be a spectacle so picturesque. Back from Damascus 
to Kufa the slow pageant wound, this time with white 
biers borne on men's shoulders between the horsemen and 
the camels. And so, amid the sobs and outcries of the 
faithful, the players made their circuitous way into the 
press of the Bazaar. 

IV 

How many times this confused and fragmentary ver- 
sion of the Passion Play was repeated, I cannot say. I 
did not happen to go back to Masjid-i-Shah until Mo- 
harrem was over. But the next day I saw in the street 
another procession that was a thing to remember. Every 
quarter of the town — corresponding to the mediaeval 
parishes — has its own pageant of Moharrem, got up by 
public subscription, by the generosity of one well-to-do 
citizen, or even by that of citizens no more of this world. 
There is consequently great rivalry between the different 
processions, and their routes have to be mapped out with 
care lest two of them chance to meet. In that unhappy 
case, since neither will yield the right of way, the blood 
of the faithful is more than likely to flow anew. 

Our quarter, or the quarter nearest our extramural 
suburb, is named Kolapa. What that name may mean, 
I don't know. Perhaps nothing. At any rate, Habib 
thought it necessary for me to inspect the cortege of 
Kolapa, in preference to others, farther afield. I saw it, 
accordingly, in surroundings perhaps not quite so theat- 
rical as the square of Masjid-i-Shah, yet characteristic 
enough. These surroundings were those of a cemetery, 

139 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

lying on uneven ground and encircled by the mud walls 
and houses of the town. A Persian cemetery is always 
to be recognised by its flat, haphazard stones, without 
shrub or tree for beauty. They say, alas, that cemeteries 
may also be recognised by other senses than that of sight. 
For in Persia no regulations exist as to the depth of graves, 
and your Iranian is no man to dig deeper than he need. 
Which does not prevent him from collecting the frozen 
snow of winter in hollows among the graves, and storing 
it in some convenient dugout between them for the 
sherbets of summer. I discovered no such arrange- 
ments in this particular cemetery; but the waters of a 
jub, an irrigation channel, out of which no one ever 
hesitates to drink, ran merrily along its lower side. On 
its highest point, in suggestive proximity to the graves, 
stood a gallows. At that moment no highwayman hap- 
pened to be swinging from it — to the regret of Habib, 
who coveted for me the most characteristic impressions of 
his native town. 

To that end he escorted me to the roof of a public bath 
encroaching upon one edge of the cemetery. No house 
in Hamadan is a skyscraper; but as baths like to burrow 
underground, their roofs are not too difficult to reach. 
This roof we found in the possession of a company of 
ladles, who looked a little doubtful at my appearance in 
their midst. However, those of them who occupied the 
highest point of vantage at once recognised that it was 
their duty to retire in my favour. And in the face of 
so evident a ruling of public opinion what could I do 
but scramble up in their stead, accept a basket which a 
youth handed me to sit on, and endow him with the ridic- 
ulously excessive tip of some two cents. 

140 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

From the fact that this youth wore nothing but one 
striped towel, which he seemed to fmd entirely adequate 
protection against the eager and the nipping air of a 
winter climate of Colorado or the Engadine, I took him 
for an attendant of the bath beneath us. His business 
among the ladies on the roof was to turn over with his 
bare feet a quantity of manure spread out there in the 
sun to dry, and to regulate the unfathomable operations 
of a chimney covered with an Ali Baba jar of blue glaze. 
Every so often he would remove this jar, by means of 
the handles conveniently encircling its neck. Between 
times he held impassioned conversations with his col- 
leagues below, through a hole in a dome where a glass 
bull's eye had once been. Out of it escaped a lazy cloud 
of steam into the clear air. 

Other youths appeared from time to time, offering for 
sale mysterious condiments which the ladies were more 
eager to taste than I. One such dainty looked like a mess 
of boiled beets, wrapped in the grandfather of all filthy 
rags. Another was a species of macaroon. The favourite 
was a collection of poisonous looking candies, which the 
ladies fed incessantly to babies in funny little round 
spangled caps. As for the babies, toward whom their 
mothers otherwise exhibited undisguised affection, they 
did not curl up and die. On the contrary, they crowed 
and waved their arms and legs, quite like the most scien- 
tifically brought up babies in the world, and tried to jump 
off the roof of the bath in order to join their papas on the 
opposite side of the street. These gentlemen sat com- 
fortably on their heels in the sun, engaged in the pleasures 
of The Chase or smoking thick straight pipes, and no 
doubt exchanging scandalous opinions with regard to 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

the not too rigorously veiled beauties perched on the 
roof of the bath. I had heard terrible stories of the 
fanaticism of the Persians during Moharrem, and had in 
fact been rather struck by their unwillingness to allow 
me to see the inside of a bath or a mosque. Conse- 
quently it pleased me not a little to discover these good 
Hamadanis so human and friendly, and so disposed to 
let both me and my camera into what had the air of being 
a large family party. 

The procession, when at last it appeared, was very 
much like the processions of Masjid-i-Shah. This time, 
however, I enjoyed the advantage of seeing it very much 
nearer at hand, if in a less picturesque perspective. And 
it contained several new and interesting features. The 
first sign of it was one of those files of small boys carrying 
a little banner and a hand, beating their breasts and 
chanting shrilly the names of the martyred Imams. Be- 
hind them rose a sound of deeper voices, intermingled 
with a barbaric blare of brass. Then from the narrow 
street debouching upon the cemetery emerged two long 
lines of Mr. Shuster's gendarmes and thirty-two pairs of 
horses. Some were mounted, others were led by grooms; 
and the high saddles of the latter were covered with hand- 
some stuffs and embroideries. One fine stallion — a mare, 
for that matter, is rarely seen on the streets in Persia, 
and a gelding almost never — was caparisoned in black, 
being the charger of Hosein. Next came the three kinds 
of banners we had seen the day before. The staves of a 
few were tipped by the symbolic hand of the Holy Family, 
those of most ending in a spherical gilt cone. There fol- 
lowed the more enigmatic metal emblem at the head of 
the flagellants. As borne by the men of Kolapa this dis- 

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THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

played no little brass temples, but two thin steel blades 
lower than the one in the centre, all three of them being 
mounted on flat pear-shaped bases of steel which were 
chased with Arabic lettering; and from the bar supporting 
them hung a quantity of shawls and embroideries of price. 
With regard to this wonderful emblem Habib gave me to 
understand something about Ali's famous sword of Zul- 
fikar, saying something also about Mohammed and Ho- 
sein. But between my lack of tongues and Habib's lack 
of letters, 1 do not pretend to explain the true symbolism 
of those nodding swords, whose points were weighted 
with tassels. 

What came next was an object I had not seen before. 
It was a staff swathed in white gauze and white wax 
flowers, on top of which were three curved metal prongs 
sustaining three small winged and crowned cherubs. 
After them marched an assembly of Seids, descendants 
of the Prophet, rhythmically striking their green turbans. 
Then followed two companies of flagellants, chanting a 
wild antiphone out of which I could distinguish only the 
names of the Imams. There were no men in white this 
time. All were in black, beating their breasts and throw- 
ing handfuls of chopped straw over their bare heads. 
Many of them, however, despite the keen December air, 
were stripped to the waist. And they gave me an ex- 
cellent opportunity to study the secrets of a Persian coif- 
fure. I had noticed how seldom any hair was visible on 
a forehead that wore a kola, and how often the wearers of 
that tall felt cap affected the shaven neck which is not 
unknown in our own part of the world. I now discovered 
that most of them had shaved a wide strip all the way 
from their foreheads to their necks, leaving only the long 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

side locks which are the pride of a Persian dandy. Others 
exhibited a wide half moon of naked skin, sweeping 
around the temples and the crown, or a great cowl that 
left nothing of their hair but a fringe like a Japanese 
doll's; while the heads of a few were shorn completely 
bare. 

The second part of the procession was led by a band of 
buglers and trumpeters, whose copper trumpets were 
longer than any trombone I ever saw in the triumphal 
march of ''Aida." And what sounds burst from them! 
There followed a squadron of lancers, and a small boy in 
green on a horse with black trappings. This small boy 
impersonated, according to my companion, the young 
Imam Ali Asghar, who was taken captive to Damascus. 
And behind him were borne, on two ornamental biers, 
the head and the headless trunk of the martyred Hosein. 
At sight of these amazingly cadaverous relics, which 
seemed to be made of wax or papier mache, the spectators 
fell into their wildest tears and sobs. 

So many features of the rest of this part of the pageant 
were new to me that I cannot be quite sure of their order. 
But I saw a white box of some kind, surmounted by an 
image of the dove that flew from Kerbela to Medina to 
tell the Prophet in his tomb of his grandson's tragic end. 
There was also a live white dove, perched on a white 
litter which was supposed to contain the young widow 
Zobeida. The Imam's daughter was impersonated by a 
small boy whose sobs excited the liveliest sympathy. 
So did the sight of several other litters, bearing away to 
slavery in Damascus the unhappy Zeineb and other 
women and children of the Family of the Tent. In me, 
however, the emotion they chiefly excited was the baser 

144 




ZOBEIDA S LITTER 



145 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

one of covetousness, at the spectacle of the shawls, rugs, 
and figured stuffs that protected the travellers from the 
sun. 

Behind the palanquins of the Holy Family appeared a 
series of quaint floats, which were generally no more than 
slabs of wood carried on the heads of one or two men. 
One of the first of them supported a rocking cradle, per- 
haps that of the child killed in Hosein's arms. On an- 
other stood a small lion, cousin, german to the friend of 
Androcles, who befriended the defenders of Kerbela. 
He bent over a wounded Arab and attempted in none too 
leonine a manner to pull an arrow out of his breast. 
The greater number of the objects thus borne past were 
more gruesome, being the mutilated members of the 
lesser martyrs. A pair of legs would be represented by a 
pair of big Russian boots, lying heel to heel. Other 
more realistic human parts would miraculously twitch 
as you watched them — in response, I discovered, to the 
jerking of a secret string. But once in a while the move- 
ment of an eyelid or of a lip betrayed the fact that the 
corpse was a boy with part of his body concealed. And 
in front of many of the dismembered trunks a head was 
borne on a pike — too small to look very lifelike, but from 
the necks of which drops of some sanguine liquid dripped 
on the heads and hands of those carrying the pikes. 

Among the floats, one that interested me not least — 
though perhaps it was intended to represent an open litter 
of the kind you see on Persian journeys — contained, if 
you please, two youths dressed as Europeans. One of 
them, in a helmet and a Norfolk jacket which must once 
have come out of some cupboard in our colony, held a 
small spyglass with which he would intently search the 

146 



THE GREAT SLAUGHTER 

horizon, every now and then clapping his hand to his head 
in a far from European manner. The other, in whom it 
required some imagination to see a woman, was spectacled 
Hke a missionary of the old school; and he held a brass 
barber's bowl, deeply nicked on one side, in which lay 
one of those small bleeding heads. The legend of these 
Europeans has many variations. The one I heard in 
Hamadan was that the wicked Caliph Yezid ordered the 
Dutch ambassador at his court — a Dutch ambassador, at 
Damascus, in 68 1! — to cut off Hosein's head. This the 
ambassador refused to do, and thereupon embraced the 
true faith as professed by the Shiites. When this scene 
is acted out at Masjid-i-Shah, the Europeans are dressed 
after their conversion in Oriental robes and borne off in 
high splendour. Another version has it that the Firengi 
ambassador tried to obtain terms for the Family of 
the Tent, and failing in his pious mission renounced his 
own faith. Still another represents a Firengi young wo- 
man as travelling, in the notorious manner of Firengi 
young women, over the plains of Irak Arabi, and arriving 
at Kerbela the night after the fatal battle. When she 
prepares to camp on the sacred ground, blood oozes out 
of the sand at every attempt of her servants to drive in a 
tent peg ; and she finally goes to bed in Damascus. During 
the night Christ appears to her in a dream, telling her the 
tragic story of the hillock on which she tried to pitch 
her tent and revealing to her a vision of the battlefield, 
where a Beduin robber is prowling. The marauder is 
frightened away by the voice of Hosein, declaring from 
his tomb that there is no God but God. The tomb, over 
which doves are fluttering, is further guarded from dese- 
cration by a company consisting of Christ, Mohammed, 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Moses, prophets, angels, and other holy persons. And 
the fair infidel is so moved that on waking up she at once 
announces her belief in Islam. But all these stories 
agree in the essential fact that even a dog of a Christian 
is more humane and accessible to the claims of the truth 
than the hated Syrian Caliph. A counterpart of this 
fact is the old proclamation of the conquering Sultans of 
Stambul that the death of one Shiite was more agreeable 
to God than that of seventy Christians. Which are 
matters to remember in discussing Holy Wars and the 
spread of Pan-Islamism. 

I have not mentioned the grave diggers who followed 
the corpses of the slain, carrying on their shoulders their 
pointed spades with a crossbar for the foot of the digger. 
More moving to the spectators was the train of captives 
near the end of the procession. Some of them were on 
mule back, and bloody knives pierced their heads and 
their bodies in the most startling fashion. Several of 
these wounded prisoners were urchins of no more than 
eight or ten, whose pallor and faintness were so well 
simulated that a louder chorus of sobs accompanied them 
up the street. Others marched afoot, with wooden yokes 
of slavery around their necks; and mounted lancers in 
helmets and scarlet coats drove them from behind with 
whips. Once in a while a flick of the lash would be too 
much like the real thing, drawing from the victim a yell 
of the most unfeigned. The arch-villain of the piece, 
though whether Amr or Shimr I cannot say, surveyed his 
bondmen haughtily from the rear, riding in gorgeous 
Syrian robes between two files of liveried attendants and 
greeted by the groans and derision of the populace. 
And last of all, loaded with saddlebags and those funny 

148 




149 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

little painted boxes, ambled the mules of the humbler 
travellers, who were not too overcome by the prospect 
of the miseries that awaited them at the hands of Yezid 
(may his name be cursed!) to exchange the liveliest 
salutations with their friends along the way. 



For three days the pageants of the Great Slaughter 
continued to fill the streets with clamour and colour and 
weeping. What I saw as I strolled about the town was 
too much like what I had already seen to bear retelling. 
The same picture was repeated innumerable times in 
every conceivable setting — though always against the 
same background of tawny walls, with the same strange- 
ness of gonfalon and oriflamme and nodding emblematic 
blades, of lances and copper trumpets, of black and scar- 
let, and swaying palanquins. One such picture comes 
back to me the most vividly because it was set on the 
pointed stone arch of a bridge across the river. One of 
the horses in the procession wore on his bridle a fantastic 
ruff of white peacocks' feathers, rising above the head of 
the rider. And somewhere behind him a boy kneeled 
on one of the floats two men were carrying, his uplifted 
hands silhouetted against the sky like the symbol of a 
nation's faith and pride. 

That night the servants told us that there would be no 
more pageants in the streets. The Governor had for- 
bidden them. Was it, I wondered, because a custom 
reminiscent of Pilate and Barabbas permits these passion- 
players to demand of him the release of any prisoner they 
choose to name? 



150 



OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

Un salon de huit ou onie personnes aimahles, oil la conver- 
sation est gate, anecdotique, et ou Von prend un punch leger a 
minuit et demi, est Vendroit du monde ou je me trouve le mieux. 

Henri Beyle: armance 
/ saidy " I am out hunting friends," and they told me, with a 
kind of eager gravity, " You will find them . . /' 

Jean Kenyon Mackenzie: black sheep 



A ND do you fancy that because we lodge in mud 
i\ houses and live four hundred, five hundred, I 

/ % don't know how many hundred miles from a 
M Jl railroad, we have neither forms nor refinements? 
O la! la! But I came so near making the same mistake 
myself that when, from one moment to another, I packed 
my trunk for Persia, the last thing it occurred to me to 
put into it was a supply of visiting cards. Only by good 
luck did I happen to think of a dinner jacket. What, 
then, was my stupefaction in Hamadan to find myself 
launched before I knew it upon a torrent of tea, nibbling 
through mountains of dinners, and trotting about from 
door to door with as much zeal as would have done credit 
to the most sedulous man about town. 

This phenomenon is perhaps to be interpreted in the 
light of strange tales a member of a certain Arctic expedi- 

151 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

tion used to tell me, about the relations that existed be- 
tween different explorers after they had glared at each 
other a year or two across the same igloo. Our igloos, 
I hasten to add, are rather more commodious, and there 
are enough of them to afford us an occasional change of 
air. Still, for people brought up to go to the theatre, 
to listen to music, to visit museums and libraries, to 
lounge in clubs, and to read newspapers, Ecbatana, 
agreeable as it is, is after all a little barer of resources than 
some capitals. There is a post, to be sure; but it arrives 
only twice a week — when it doesn't happen to be held up 
by storms in the Caspian or snow in the passes — and our 
mail is anywhere from two weeks to two months old by 
the time we get it. So when we have answered our 
letters, balanced our accounts, beaten our servants, and 
otherwise dealt with the estate to which it hath pleased 
God to call us, what else have we to do, besides exercising 
our legs and our horses and playing at bowls with our 
Swiss friends, but to entertain or be entertained by each 
other? And how should we do it otherwise than as we 
used to do it at home? 

It is curious, though, how an old matter will renew it- 
self in an unfamiliar setting, and how a man will never 
tire of a game he has played all his life, simply because he 
cannot live long enough to exhaust its possibilities. The 
most hardened diner out, for instance, could hardly fail 
to be amused by a dinner party whose exact time could 
not be set. That is one charm of our dinner parties. 
For while Hamadan recognises the existence of noon, 
Hamadan sets its own watch by the variable hour of 
sunset — which also marks the boundary between date 
and date. Our unbelieving clocks therefore go their own 

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OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

gait with the most refreshing independence, save for 
rare corrections by a not too accessible missionary sun- 
dial. And a guest who arrives at dinner in time for 
the coffee can always invoke the slowness of his watch; 
while those of the more moral sort make a practice of 
comparing time-pieces beforehand, in order not to 
appear on the scene of action an hour too early or too 
late! 

There are other ways in which going out to dinner in 
Hamadan is given a flavour of its own. In front of us 
marches Habib, and perhaps Mehm'd Ali, too, bearing a 
lily. A lily? A lily — though not the same kind as the 
immortal one borne by Mr. Gilbert's pure young man in 
his mediaeval hand. This lily — or laleh, which means 
the same thing — guides our patent-leathered feet past the 
pitfalls of Hamadan, being a candle stuck in;o a tin tube, 
with a small glass globe at the top to protect the flame 
from the winds of Elvend. By the light of it we make our 
way through dark and muddy streets to a sublime porte 
recessed in a semicircle of decorative plaster panels. 
At one end of this recess is a Loggia dei Lanii, tenanted 
not by Benvenuto Cellinis but by a dozing beggar or 
two, who do not fail to profit by the time it takes that 
low wooden door to open. It is studded, the door, with 
spikes, bosses, knockers, locks, clamps, and hinges of 
brass which answer the flicker of the lily while Habib 
pounds, shouting "Mesh'di Hasan! Ker' Hasan! Hajji 
Hasan!" in a climax of honorific titles that are long in 
producing their effect. At last Hasan lets us into a 
vaulted brick octagon, with a door or a niche in each face 
of it. Whether Hasan be Meshedi or Kerbelai or Hajji; 
however, we shall never know, for he suddenly disappears. 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

We, therefore, not knowing which way to turn, naturally 
turn to the right and come out into a court with a pool 
in the middle and a house at the farther end, where a 
woman clutching her veil in one hand and a lakh in the 
other waves us wildly away. Heavens! An anderun — 
or as you might understand better, a harem. "It is 
better to dwell in a corner of the housetop than with a 
brawling woman in a wide house!" We flee precipitately 
in the opposite direction, blundering this time into another 
court, without a pool but with two more houses at either 
end of it. Wrong again, we learn, after more knocking 
and shouting. By this time Hasan has found the house- 
boy he went to look for, and we are led out of the octagon 
by a third door, through a low brick tunnel, into a cloister 
that is worth travelling five hundred miles from a railroad 
to see, encircled as it is by pillars of the inimitable Per- 
sian slimness, with stalactite capitals, set between a nar- 
row ambulatory and a black pool. Our candles flicker 
the length of it, past a swimming star or two, to another 
crooked little passage of mystery that finally emerges into 
the biggest court of all, with a high talar at each end and 
another enormous pool between them. Up a steep flight 
of brick steps we climb, across a talar, through a huge 
room as cold as an iceberg, and on into a cosy little one 
where faggots snap in a stucco fireplace. 

''Better is a dinner of herbs, where love is, than a 
stalled ox and hatred therewith.'' But best is a dinner 
of pilau, and gossip therewith, on leaving which you 
stumble in the hall over a kursi with a circle of black hats 
sticking out from under it. Why this unusual ornament 
in a front hall? Because a few nights ago a thief either 
broke in or was let into the place, and, being discovered, 

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OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

got lost like ourselves in the maze of courts and passages 
and so was caught. He turned out to be a one-handed 
man, which means that he was an old offender: the penalty 
of being light-fingered in Persia is to be relieved of the 
unruly member. The poor wretch is now in a fair way 
to lose his other hand as well. For he sits in a certain 
apartment at the Governor's, designed for such as he, 
where he is alternately cross-questioned and bastinadoed. 
Whence the protecting black hats, asleep around a kursi 
in the hall. 

As for us, we are more than likely to have no protecting 
black hats about us on our journey home — especially 
when Madam Moon is a-sail in her Persian sky. This, 
alas, is a thing to cause shakings of the head. If we were 
Persians, and didn't happen to know the password of the 
night, it might be a thing to land us at the Governor's, 
too. Being merely Firengis, and therefore irresponsible 
in our acts, the watchmen we meet say nothing. The 
miniature brooks in the silent streets say more, gurgling 
gaily in the moonlight. Most of all say the dogs, on 
whose account it is well to carry a stout stick. But one 
night a watchman detached himself from his squad, tak- 
ing pity on our defenceless condition, and saw us cour- 
teously home. And when we reached our own gate, not a 
stivver could one of us produce to tip our protector withaL 
He, still courteous, stalked away without a word, though 
perhaps not without his opinion of beings so strange as 
to have neither dignity nor money. 

Few of the dinners to which we go can boast quite this 
setting of romance. One of the first to which I was 
bidden, indeed, took place on Thanksgiving Day, in 
such company and amid such surroundings of my own 

155 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

country that had it not been for the person who passed 
the turkey and the cranberry sauce, a stocking-footed 
individual magnificent in white trousers and a long- 
tailed brass-buttoned coat which looked as if it might 
have been cut out of my grandmother's "Cashmere" 
shawl, I never would have known that some of my fellow 
diners counted their absence from America not by years 
but by decades. If they treated me the more kindly 
because my grandfather, who was one of the first Amer- 
icans to set foot in Persia, cleared the way for them nearly 
a hundred years ago, they did not cast me off when they 
discovered me to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. So do not 
expect me to make copy out of them — beyond saying 
that they taught me how friendly and human a missionary 
may be. 

The house to which we go oftenest of all has least in it 
to remind us where we are. It does, to be sure, remind us 
of the cousinship between Persia and India, being built 
on the lines of an Indian bungalow, with wide verandas 
running the whole length of it in front and behind; and 
black hats bring in the tea or serve the dinner. But once 
they are gone the drawing room is a piece of England, 
down to the very coals on the hearth and the carpet on 
the floor — in this country whose rugs are in demand the 
world over! It is a perfect example of the steadfastness 
with which the Englishman sticks to his own. And we 
are sure to find there the modern descendant of that fam- 
ous old British type of the gentleman adventurer, who 
likes a bit of a lark and the sight of strange suns, who 
rides, shoots, plays tennis and tent-pegging, and other- 
wise comports himsel in a manner which no Persian — 
and no German — can understand, any more than they 

156 



OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

will ever understand how such men have come to inherit 
so goodly a portion of the earth. 

What might cause the German in particular to throw 
up his hands is the music to be heard there after dinner. 
Do you sing or play? Never mind: in that hospitable 
drawing room you have to, just as at Mr. Britling's every- 
body had to try their hand at hockey. And not many of 
us can acquit ourselves so creditably as the master of the 
house, as one of the lady missionaries, or as that visitor 
from afar who entranced us one night with his esiudiantina 
songs of Smyrna, accompanying himself on his lute. But 
it is gay, it is human, it is homey. And afterward we 
dance. We dance on that English carpet! And as the 
society of gentleman adventurers inevitably has a strong 
masculine tinge, the men can often get no better partners 
than each other. Nor do we fox-trot and I don't know 
what. We dance the good old-fashioned waltz— not, 
mind you, that hybrid two-step in waltz time which in 
my generation was the thing in America. An occasional 
concession to America is a true two-step; and I have seen 
there a hesitating one-step and a perfectly unhesitating 
Highland Fling. At any rate, we caper, on that magic 
carpet flown from England to Persia, till unheard of hours 
in the morning, while black hats peer in from the veranda 
and ask themselves what extraordinary, if not immoral, 
things the Firengis can be up to. 

There is another and more essential savour of our so- 
ciety, to be tasted in the houses of us all. I happen to 
have seen a few foreign colonies in my day, but Hamadan is 
another pair of sleeves. For we are neither people of 
leisure living in Persia for the enrichment of aesthetic 
souls or the easing of depleted pocket books, nor are we 

157 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

hewers of wood and drawers of water for a plutocratic 
ruling caste. On the contrary, we rather give ourselves 
the airs of a ruling caste, albeit most of us are merchants 
or missionaries. These, I take it, are the most populous 
estates in Persia, though the Service and the Bank take 
precedence of them at dinner. In Hamadan the Service 
is very thinly represented by one consul, a Turk, and 
two bachelor vice consuls, an Englishman and a Russian. 
Upon the Bank, therefore, falls the social primacy among 
us, the manager of it being known to all mankind as the 
Rets, the Chief. That other Persian estate, the Tele- 
graph, is foreign to us, since we are off the main line of 
the Anglo-Indian wire. To make up for it we have 
the Gendarmerie, the Customs, the Road, and the 
Alliance — the Alliance Israelite Universelle, of which 
more anon. 

Now you have here the ingredients of a sufficient diver- 
sity. And this diversity is further variegated by the 
number of flags we fly. Among us — I take pains to follow 
the alphabet! — are Americans, hyphenate Armenians, 
Belgians, a Bulgarian, Englishmen, Frenchmen, a Ger- 
man or two, Greeks, Russians, a Swede, Swiss, and Turks. 
What draws out, however, the true flavour of this peacock 
pie is that no one element is large enough to suffice to 
itself. So whether I will or no, I, who am in theory an 
enraged enemy of cosmopolitanism, see every day some 
such contrast of race or of worldly estate as delights my 
secret heart better than all else in life. What, for ex- 
ample, can be a more touching example of the lion lying 
down with the lamb than to behold an elderly missionary 
from rural America pour a cup of tea for a handsome 
young Frenchman — very much awake, as they say in 

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OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

his country — or a Russian officer kiss the hand of a Jewess 
who came to Ecbatana from Babylon by way of the 
Quartier Latin ? Yet I notice that our gatherings — 
and some of them collect almost all of us under one roof — 
deficient as they incline to be on the distaff side, do not 
seem to include certain fairer members of our circle. 
One is a young Frenchwoman, governess in the family of 
the Turkish consul, whose mots are in constant circulation 
amongst us but not her visiting cards. Can it be that 
we are snobbish about Mile. Celestine? I did not have 
time to find out, for she deserted us in company with a 
Greek rug man. Then there is the mysterious being who 
keeps house for the Russian roadmaster, by some reported 
to be a countess, by others a cook: why do I never meet 
her at dinner? And I shall always bitterly regret that 
inopportune flight of a fellow-countrywoman of my own, 
whose fantastic legend made her out at once a queen of 
the music hall and consort of a Persian Khan. Ventur- 
ing hither to inspect his ancestral estates, she became for a 
moment the bright particular star of our society and the 
confidante of the missionary ladies. But, alas, she was 
so cruel as to vanish no more than a few weeks before my 
arrival. 

Gossip, my masters? But characters, too, and situa- 
tions, and settings, and ready-made plots! Some of 
them are Jane Austen and Henry James. Others are 
Kipling or Conrad. A few are Arabian Nights. Not 
for these chaste pages are they, therefore. And, for the 
rest, most of them concern people whose bread one has 
eaten, and so, however they may provoke the itching 
hand to clap them between covers, must be permitted to 
walk their romantic ways at large. 

159 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 



II 



Where three people live within thirty-three miles of 
each other, two of them are sure to form a clique. This 
is the law of life, and I shall not be foolish enough to cry 
out against it. I am rather sorry, though, that we see so 
little of the Russians. My first impulse is to make friends 

with a Russian. But Half a dozen buts. Distance 

is one. None of them happen to live very near us. Lan- 
guage is another That blessed Anglo-Russian Agree- 
ment of 1907 is a third, by virtue of which Englishmen 
and Russians in Persia are generally at swords' points 
— or were, under the old regime. Then mysterious coun- 
tess-cooks do not fit into the Anglo-Saxon scheme of 
things. And the vice-consul, who is also official head of 
the bank: it is remembered of him that he was once porter 
of the Russian bank in Meshed, in a muzhik's smock. 
And he studies French with Mile. Celestine. That Mile. 
Celestine somehow casts an unfortunate air around the 
Russian vice-consulate. Nothings, nothings, which added 
together contrive to make a something. 

1, of course, am not frightened by Mile. Celestine, or 
by a countess-cook, or even by a banker vice-consul 
who has been a muzhik. On the contrary, they look to 
me like uncommonly good copy — to use a gross profes- 
sional term — and I am dying to call on them. But what 
to do — if I am the guest of the British half of the Agree- 
ment of 1907, whose face I cannot blacken? Again 
nothings, which added together make a something! 
Nevertheless, accident brought it about not only that 
I should meet Mile. Celestine, but that I should dine at 
the Russian vice-consulate And O dear how I contrived 

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to blacken my own face, if not that of my entire race! 
It came about in this wise. The initiated had told me 
that no matter at what hour you were invited to dine at 
the Russian vice-consulate, dinner was never served 
before eleven. Now it happened that on the appointed 
evening Hamadan produced one of her rarest miracles. 
It rained. It rained so furiously, and I had so far to 
walk through swimming and unfamiliar streets, that I 
thought myself perfectly safe in starting about nine. 
And I found my host at his dessert. I attempted lame 
apologies by saying that I had lost my way. My host 
was good enough to apologise in turn for his promptness, 
informing me that as it was neither Wednesday nor 
Saturday he was free of the courrier de Petersbourg. "I 
have so much to do, my God!" he cried, clapping his 
hands. "I have so much to do!" He must, poor 
wretch, what with his vice-consulate and his bank and his 
French lessons. But he was simple and friendly, as a 
Russian knows how to be to a stranger, and he kept filling 
up the glasses around my plate so fast and so indiscrimi- 
nately, with vodka, beer, champagne, and liqueurs, that 
I had to be careful what I did with them. 

What troubled me most about this accident was that 
another guest was the new commander of the Persian 
Cossacks — a grave and handsome officer who quite evi- 
dently had never been a muzhik. He further upset my 
calculations by drinking only wine, and next to none of 
that; and very quizzically did he look at the two of 
us. At first he had very little to say, saying it in a French 
which filled me with envy. He told me that his superiors 
had not quite made up their minds whether to choose 
Hamadan or Kermanshah for a post of Cossacks. He 

i6i 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

hoped Hamadan, because it is higher and cooler. He 
was a man of the mountains himself, from Tiflis. And 
he said his wife was German. I have often thought about 
them since. In the meantime, he said, he had been look- 
ing for a house to live in, and had taken on trial the 
roomy mansion of a Hamadani with twenty wives — eight 
of whom, to be sure, lived in other places than Hamadan. 
It seems there is a highly popular and perfectly lawful 
institution in this country whereby in addition to the 
four legal consorts approved by the Koran, a man may 
have temporary wives to any number! 

Among other interesting things the Colonel told us 
that there had been a good deal of talk in the Russian 
papers of late about a certain mysterious traveller in 
Persia, of whom I had already heard. I had heard about 
him because he owned one of the few automobiles in the 
country. What I had not heard about him was that, 
having a French name and a Brazilian passport, he was 
supposed to be a German and a secret agent. At any 
rate, he seemed to make most of his journeys in that part 
of Persia which adjoins the Baghdad trail, and the Rus- 
sian papers reported that he had been buying land, or 
lending money to landowners, in the region of Isfahan — 
presumably to establish ''interests" for the Germans 
against the day when the question of the Persian branch 
of the Baghdad railway should come up. The Czar 
and the Kaiser, the Colonel reminded me, had an inter- 
view about that matter at Potsdam in 19 lo. In pursu- 
ance of the understanding at which they arrived the Rus- 
sians were to have according to one account five years, 
according to another ten, in which to build a line from the 
north to Khanikin. And if they didn't do it within the 

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time agreed upon, the coast was to be clear for the Ger- 
mans. 

We afterward saw a good deal of the Colonel and his 
German wife. She, at least, fitted into the Anglo-Saxon 
scheme of things! So, more or less, did the wife of the 
banker vice-consuFs assistant. The latter has a French 
name, too, he speaks excellent English, and they say he is 
of German extraction. Who knows? In those simple 
days one didn't pay much attention to such things. He 
is at all events suave, and more worldly wise than his 
chief, over whom he seems to exert a subtle authority. 
Even in those simple days, however, I used to wonder if 
this was another example of the case of which Mr. Shuster 
had a taste, whereby under the old regime there was so 
often a double authority in Russian affairs, the power be- 
hind the throne sometimes being stronger than the throne 
itself. But being myself nothing but a humble noter of 
the appearances of this world, I took quite as much 
interest in another member of the Russian colony whom 
I encountered behind a samovar. I first tried him in 
English and French, and nothing happened Then, if 
you please, he tried me in Turkish. And through that dark 
medium it came out that he was a Bulgarian, whom a 
fantastic destiny had landed in a Russian bank in Persia! 

Some of the visitors who help to keep life in Hamadan 
from becoming monotonous are Russians, and not the 
least amusing. One of them might have been the hero of 
a famous Russian story. He was a son of papa from 
Petersburg, who came to inspect the bank. He spent 
two or three months in our midst, during which time he 
put his nose into his bank for two half hours. In like 
manner did he pass a year and a half in Persia, at twenty- 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

five roubles a day; but he went home woefully in debt. 
He was delightful, and an indefatigable bridge player. 
No less delightful, though rather more responsible as an 
inspector, was a dazzling young man who came to make 
reports on Russian commerce. I remember hearing him 
say one night after dinner that his people had decided 
not to build that railway to Khanikin. Why should they? 
It would only favour competition against themselves. 
If the Germans chose to, let th^m. As for the English, 
he had been astounded to fmd out that their famous oil 
concession extended right up to the frontier of the Cau- 
casus, where there is plenty of oil as yet untapped. Very 
clever of them; but very disagreeable for Baku. But 
those English, luckily, are so unenterprising! They were 
enterprising enough, though, he added, to have suggested a 
revision of the Agreement of 1907. He thought it might 
be a good idea. 

All this was said in an English house, with that discon- 
certing frankness of which a Russian has the secret. I, 
however, being of an incurable light-mindedness, was 
even more enchanted by his vignettes of the characters a 
traveller will encounter. He told us, in his fluent but not 
perfectly idiomatic English, about a lady who had been 
unfortunate in husbands. One fell out of a window, 
another got himself shot in the Caucasus, something else 
happened to the third. And then she had found it in her 
to marry an aviator. "But what a carelessness!" he 
cried. "They perish!" 

Ill 

It is a sample of those curious strata of ignorance that 
darken the mind of man that I could have lived so many 

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years in the same world with the Alliance Universelle 
Israelite — or is it the Alliance Israelite Universelle ? — 
without hearing anything about it. In Hamadan, how- 
ever, I heard about it very soon. And I gave myself 
the pleasure of going with the Sah'b and the Khanum to 
call on it. 

Having done so, I cannot boast that I made the most 
of my opportunities. All I can say is that the late 
Baron Hirsch of Vienna had something to do with found- 
ing the Alliance, that its headquarters are in Paris, that 
it maintains excellent schools for the Jews in many parts 
of Asia and Africa, and that it has maintained one in 
humble Hamadan since 1900. Whence it is that mir^as 
may be picked up here who speak a very fair French. The 
school is carried on entirely in that language. There are 
two schools, really, one for girls and one for boys. They 
stand in the same enclosure in the heart of the city, though 
in a northwestern quarter of it with which I never became 
very familiar. The gateway let us into a big trim court, 
set about with buildings quite the most imposing and the 
most European-looking in Hamadan. Over the portico 
of one were emblazoned in Latin letters the names of 
Baron Hirsch and other philanthropists of his race. And 
the one where the resident teachers live has more of a 
Latin than a Persian look, with its long pillared porch. 

The director and his wife received us in a drawing 
room not so different from one of ours, though rather 
chillier. They are evidently of the Chosen People, 
longer-nosed, quicker-witted, speaking infinitely better 
French than we. Monsieur was born in Constantinople, 
has lived long in Paris, and enjoys more than a bowing 
acquaintance with Egypt and Algiers. Madame is a 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

small, plump, prolific person, disconcertingly cross-eyed, 
who administers advice and rebuke to her numerous 
progeny while allowing none of the conversation to escape 
her. We have the more in common because the Khanum 
has been good enough to help out the missionary school 
during an absence of a member of the staff. Some one 
puts the case upon the plane of humour by saying that 
the Khanum has become a rival of the ladies of the Alli- 
ance. *'But no!" objects Monsieur amiably. ''You do 
good and we do good. In good there is no rivalry.'' 
He confesses that Persia makes him regret northern Africa 
a little. Pursuing comparisons, he tells us that in Algiers 
the French have effaced the Arab, whereas in Egypt one 
still feels him. The Sah'b, nevertheless, is a little dis- 
illusioned to hear that for all that his fellow countrymen 
are not absolutely adored by the natives of the Nile! 

There are four foreign assistants in the school — two 
young men and two young women. The latter, who 
hail from Syria, wear sunbonnets and black aprons. They 
are very gay, very coy, very given to the sidelong glance 
and to the confidential whisper. Why not, when upon 
them devolves so much of the responsibility of representing 
the sex in Hamadan? But there is no shadow of doubt 
that they could show us all their heels in arithmetic, 
geography, or any other branch of human science. The 
young men are more Oriental in appearance, being slight, 
dark, unfathomably eyed, yet of a vivacity that reminds 
me of Salonica quay. One of them, who is a native of 
Tangier, mourns the lost glories of Cairo. Even after 
Paris, he tells us, Cairo did not disenchant him. As for 
the other, he sings the praises of Baghdad. At least there 
is life there, he says. There are carriages in the streets, 

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OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

there are boats on the Tigris, there are — will you believe 
it? — cinematographs to amuse one at night. Whereas 
Hamadan, with its movies that do not move, its tea 
houses that are not cafes, its evening silence as of the 
grave O God ! 

Nevertheless, they are willing to bury themselves alive 
in a hole like this. And I had always been simple enough 
to suppose that missionaries were a Christian invention! 
Yet I seem to make out that these doers of good might not 
be regarded as among the most orthodox of Israel. They 
do not take Esther and Mordecai too seriously, or Tobias 
and the Angel. Did you know that Hamadan is the 
scene of a good part of that story, and that Tobias was 
buried here, too? I did not until I heard it at the Alliance. 
I also seem to make out, though, that our hosts have a 
sense of and a pride in the antiquity of their race, living 
here where Jews have lived since the time of Sargon, king 
of Assyria, where Darius the Great discovered and put 
into effect the decree of Cyrus with regard to the rebuild- 
ing of the temple at Jerusalem, where in the twelfth 
century the famous traveller Benjamin of Tudela found 
fifty thousand of his own people. There are not many 
more than a tenth of that number now, an astounding 
proportion of whom speak French nearly as well as 
they do Persian. 

But — I don't know — we somehow see very little of 
these intelligent and amusing members of the Alliance. 
Nothings again that make a something — distance, lan- 
guage, work. Once or twice, though, I was on the edge of 
telling one of them why we are all a little afraid of them. 
For when they pay calls they do it in a solid phalanx — 
Monsieur, Madame, the two young ladies in sunbonnets, 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

the two dark young gentlemen. And they all shout at 
the tops of their voices. 

IV 

The saints and the poets lament or boast of being in 
the world but not of it. I, being neither poet nor saint, 
find that Hamadan gives me the same sensation. And 
I know not whether to lament or to boast. In the mean- 
time I speculate, admiring how East is East and West is 
West and how seldom the twain do meet. In theory I 
regret it. In practise I incline on the whole to approve 
that instinct which makes us distrust or even dislike a 
"foreigner." A man, generally, must be one thing or 
another; and the more clearly he is one thing or the other, 
the more does he usually amount to in this unintelligible 
world. A Richard Burton, a Lafcadio Hearn, an Armin- 
ius Vambery, can contrive to be one thing and another; 
but most of us degenerate into nothing better than spies 
or tramps if we attempt it. Or in the end we get swal- 
lowed up by what we too intimately explore. So I be- 
lieve that there is something human and natural, some- 
thing not altogether shameful, at the root of such delicate 
matters as antisemitism, say, or the relations between 
Japan and America. I do not dislike a man because he is 
a Jew or a Japanese. I like or dislike Jews and Japanese 
on the same grounds that I like or dislike other people; 
and so, I fancy, is it with nearly everybody else. But 
not many people feel their hearts drawn out toward men 
who look too different from themselves, or have too dif- 
ferent manners, or are steeped in too different associa- 
tions. That is all there is, really, to antisemitism or to 
the question of the Japanese in California. Why should 

1 68 



OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES 

we not recognise so simple a fact? It operates on both 
sides of any given case — and on both sides of many more 
cases than I have named. Nor is it incompatible with 
excellent relations between countries. The truth of the 
matter is that two races, like two persons, appreciate 
each other best from a distance! It is not a thing to 
wrangle about. It is of the essence of all human ties. 
Piracy and purse-cutting are of course intolerable; but 
it is just as intolerable to fmd our neighbours perpetually 
sitting in our own chairs. This is the perfectly honest 
instinct which has formed so many personalities and civili- 
sations and brought them to a flower of their own. A 
world motley enough for the flags which now fly in it is a 
richer world than any dreamed of by the flag-melters. For 
my part, at any rate, nothing terrifies me so much as the 
possibility that mankind may be run into one mould, and 
that on all the six continents we shall one day eat and wear 
and read the same things And from the papers I have 
seen since August i, 19 14, I gather that a similar terror 
burns in worthier bosoms. 

Nevertheless, being myself of those whose tendency it 
is to degenerate into tramps or spies, I am rather sorry 
we meet so few Persians! Yet what we do see of 
them is perhaps all the more interesting to a stranger 
newly come into a strange land. That Khan, for in- 
stance, whom we passed in the street one snowy moonlight 
night — what a picture he made of customs difi'erent from 
our own ! We, of course, were hurrying home unattended, 
like pickpockets. And he? In front of him went a 
mir^a in an aha, or so he seemed to be by his cap. Next 
stalked the Khan, in a European overcoat, very slowly, 
as befits one who is no slave of time. On either side 

169 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

of him walked a servant swinging an enormous lantern of 
white linen — the size of the lanterns testifying to the con- 
sequence of the Khan. There followed another mir^a in 
another aha. And last of all marched a couple of bravoes 
with rifles on their shoulders — or matchlocks, most likely. 

Another detail of social procedure in Persia is that a 
call can never be in the nature of a surprise. Notice 
must be sent beforehand and an appointment duly made. 
No chance there for a hostess to be out — or for a caller to 
empty a cardcase in an afternoon. Your Persian is not 
so destitute of manners as to rush away after fifteen or 
thirty minutes, as if unable to sit still another instant. 
An hour is none too long for a formal call, while two 
hours, or four, or six, are not uncommon between ac- 
quaintances of some standing. We have less experience 
of these visitations than the missionaries, who follow 
the local custom of calling on their friends, Persian, He- 
brew, or Armenian, on the local holidays. And their 
friends acknowledge this courtesy by calling on the mis- 
sionaries on Christmas Day. At least this had always 
been the case until the Christmas I was in Hamadan. 
Then, after consultation among ourselves, the notice 
was sent out that callers would be received instead on 
New Year's Day — which corresponds more exactly to the 
Persian custom. But certain old stagers were so offended 
by this lapse of precedent that they refused to call at all. 
Yet even so, one of our missionary friends told us that she 
received over three hundred New Year visitors. 

Rather to their surprise, the Sah'b and the Khanum 
came in for a share of this attention. I suspect the new 
house may have had something to do with it. Any Ha- 
madani who had seen the outside of that extraordinary 

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structure was consumed by a desire to inspect the inside. 
At any rate, they began ringing the bell, or knocking at the 
gate, by half-past nine in the morning. As they were of 
both sexes, they of course had to be received in different 
parts of the house. And as the Sah'b happened to be out, 
I was finally sent for in despair to go downstairs and 
confront twenty-one kolas, not one of which I had ever 
before set eyes on and to not one of which did I suppose I 
would be able to say boo. I therefore shook twenty-one 
hands, made twenty-one bows, and whispered the same 
mystic number to Habib. It then transpired that several 
among the owners of the kolas spoke English as well as 
I, while several more — thanks to that blessed Alliance 
— spoke French. But most of them contented themselves 
with examining furtively the chairs on which they sat 
in none too much ease, and the various other strange 
objects about them. In the meantime the house-boys 
passed innumerable cups of tea, serving them on their 
knees. This exaggeration of courtesy, I imagine, must be 
a tradition of houses where everybody sits on the floor. 
As luck would have it, Mehm'd Ali had baked a couple 
of his famous cakes, which helped to fill in the gaps be- 
tween my spasmodic attempts to make small talk in 
strange tongues with twenty-one unknown beings. And 
we were also fortunate enough to have on hand a quantity 
of shirini — small, hard Persian candies which make up in 
colour what they lack in taste. 

The twenty-one were nearer forty-two by the time the 
Sah'b returned to my aid. A little later a batch of ninety 
youths appeared in a body — to pay their respects to the 
Sah'b as a patron of the American boys* school! Not 
many of them spoke any perceptible English; for the 

171 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

missionaries, unlike their colleagues of the Alliance, 
make it a point to carry on their affairs in the language of 
the country. What surprised me more was to have one 
of the ninety pointed out to me as an Englishman. Yet 
he knew English no better than the rest, being attired, 
furthermore, in the short black kola and long pleated coat 
of a Persian Khan. I could hardly wait to hear the ex- 
planation of these mysteries, which after all was simple 
enough. He was merely an example, that English boy 
in a Persian kola, of what happens when East meets West. 
His father, although born in England, had desired like 
me to know more of Persia. He had therefore turned 
Mohammedan and married a Persian, with a jewel in 
her nose — from whom the son takes his costume, his lan- 
guage, his looks. And his mind? And his future? The 

mother's, too, no doubt. But — life ! 

The Khanum in the meantime was having experiences 
of her own. Her visitors, as was proper, entered by the 
back door and were received in the dining room, from 
which the chairs had been removed to our part of the house. 
That, of course, made no difference to the ladies, who 
would not have known what to do with them. • They sat 
on the floor, where young Abbas and the cook's infantile 
apprentice handed them their share of what the older 
boys were serving the men. If they objected to our im- 
purity, they bravely swallowed their scruples with their 
tea, and perhaps went to the bath afterward. As for us, 
I know we aired the house for a good hour! But I must 
add that most of our callers were of the humbler sort. 
The Khanum told us she had answered innumerable 
questions with regard to her Hat civil. All the ladies 
wanted to know how old she was, how long she had been 

172 



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married, how many children she had, etc., etc. They 
were scandalised to hear that her parents had not found a 
husband for her till she was twenty. It is by no means 
unheard of, you know, for a Persian bride to be nine 
years old, while an unmarried girl of fifteen or sixteen is 
no better than an old maid. They found it unfortunate, 
too, that the Khanum had married late in the year as 
well as late in life. For a wedding should take place in 
the spring. Otherwise children will be long in coming, 
or will never come at all. And that, for a Persian woman, 
is the disaster of disasters. 

My own regret at having been cut off from half of so 
interesting a social event was tempered for me by an acci- 
dent which later befell me in a missionary house. I 
chanced to open the door upon a gathering of ladies, 
who were Armenians and who therefore countenanced my 
ill-timed intrusion. They all wore black lace scarves 
over their hair, which gave them rather a Spanish look; 
but what reminded me more of the Jewesses of Salonica 
was a certain outstanding black fillet bound about their 
brows. The greatest lady of them all, a banker's wife, 
dazzled me by the stupendous emerald she bore in the 
middle of her fillet, like an elderly Lucrezia Crivelli. 
Now it happens that I am consumed by an unappeasable 
passion for emeralds. The person in history whom I 
most envy is Abdaz, daughter of the tenth century Caliph 
Al Muizz of Cairo, who left at her death no less than five 
bushels of those most secret of gems. I could not keep my 
eyes off that astounding old lady. She reciprocated my 
interest to the degree of trying to talk to me. Her 
efforts were not very successful until it transpired that 
she came from Azerbaijan and spoke the Turkish dia- 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

lect of that province. Half of this is Persian, to be sure, 
and the rest is gargling. Nevertheless I, knowing a little 
of the Turkish of Stambul, was able to carry on a broken 
conversation with the happy proprietor of so magnificent 
a jewel. She inquired without forms how old I was, 
where my father lived, why I had left him, what I did for a 
living, how much money I made at it, and what steps I 
had taken against race-suicide. And her umbrage at 
hearing that I had taken none was nothing to her outcries 
over my admission that although quite old enough to 
know better I had found no more respectable business 
than writing stories — and not godly ones. In short, she 
showed me my place, did the lady of the emerald. But 
if we had not been encompassed by so great a cloud of 
witnesses I would have blurted out to that frank old 
Lucrezia Crivelli that I was ready to reform and run 
away with her — and her emerald. 

It was permitted me, at last, to enter more than one 
true Persian house. But no true Persian house I entered 
seemed to offer me quite so concentrated a flavour of 
Oriental hospitality as the one occupied by the Turkish 
consul. This was partly, of course, because I have more 
in common with a Turk than with a Persian, and because 
the speech of this Turk was music to my ears after the 
accent, say, of the old lady of the emerald. But a re- 
ception of this more honey-tongued old gentleman, given 
long after I first met him, left in my memory quite the 
most admirable among several pictures of society in 
Hamadan. Two slouchy local policemen stood guard 
at the gate. Inside we were met by a fair-haired Turkish 
soldier in a fez, looking very trim and European in com- 
parison, who escorted us through the garden to the tent 

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where His Excellency — as he did not mind being called — 
received his guests. The tent was really two tents, the 
inner one being a square red canopy without flaps, the 
outer one having flaps of embroidery in panels, and 
hanging rugs and Persian prints for further decoration. 
In front, however, the flaps were reefed up, so as to give 
us the view of the garden. And not the least ornamental 
part of this setting was a long table in front of the tent, 
on which stood symmetrically spaced pyramids of grapes, 
cherries, apricots, and — cucumbers. For in Persia a 
cucumber is regarded as a fruit, and as one of the most 
delicate. 

The first thing was to shake His Excellency's hand and 
to devise for His Excellency's ear remarks as gracious as 
may flow from an ill-trained Anglo-Saxon tongue. The 
next thing was to go the round, not too perfunctorily, of 
a large company of fezzed, turbaned, kolaed, and hatted 
sitters about His Excellency. That done chairs were 
produced. These conveniences, in fact, were the one false 
note of the occasion. We were then served with tea and 
with a most comforting ice of the morello cherry. By 
this time there was so little snow left on Elvend that the 
essential ingredient of that ice, I suppose, must have 
come from the graveyard of the gallows! We were like- 
wise invited to deface the beautiful pyramids on the table, 
but nobody had the courage to do so. Nobody said 
anything, either, unless a newcomer joined the company 
under the tent. The most imposing person whose ar- 
rival we witnessed was the prince commandant of the 
gendarmerie — a tall, slim, soldierly looking Persian who 
exchanged with His Excellency salutes more magnificent 
than you can conceive. There followed, however, the 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

most elegant young man in the world. He wore white 
duck trousers, a black broadcloth coat, yellow shoes, a 
Panama hat turned up in front, a glistening black mous- 
tache, and a gold-headed cane. And when I saw that he 
carried in his other hand a red red rose, he reminded me 
so irresistibly of the gentleman in "Patience" — is it? — 
with his affection a la Plato for a bashful young potato 
or a not too French French bean, that I nearly burst out 
before all the fezzes and turbans and kolas and hats with : 

"If he's content with a vegetable love, which would certainly 
not suit me, 

Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure 
young man must be!" 

But that no doubt was jealousy. And they told me that 
he was also a clever young man, having been born in 
Judaea, educated in Paris, and chosen as head of the 
Behai school in Hamadan, before he came to the Turkish 
consul's reception. 

How long we sat, heaven knows. We tried to be as 
polite as possible. At any rate, we were late to lunch. 



176 




XI 

THE FACTORY 

To grapple effectually with even purely material problems re- 
quires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people 
generally imagine, 

Joseph Conrad: an outpost of progress 



IT IS an object of vast curiosity in Hamadan — 
to the greatest number of eyes, no doubt, be- 
cause of the windmill that pokes its bald Amer- 
ican head above the wall. That is a story, too: 
the Odyssey of that windmill by train, ship, and camel, 
from young Chicago to New York, Port Said, Basra, 
Baghdad, Kermanshah, and old Ecbatana, where an 
exiled French chauffeur set it a-spinning in the Persian 
air. People come from miles around to admire that 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

handiwork of the Firengi, which pumps up the unwilling 
water of the East for the dyeing of rugs to be laid on 
Western floors. After that far-flown bird had wagged 
its tail for some months in the gusts of Elvend, it was 
thought advisable to deepen the well out of which the 
water a little too unwillingly rose. Well-diggers were 
accordingly called, their craft being a common one in 
this country of hidden streams. And there came a day 
when one well-digger, in a fit of spite, kicked another 
well-digger into the seventy-foot shaft. If you will be- 
lieve it, nothing untoward happened to him who tumbled 
seventy feet. But he who did the kicking was taken 
by the police and bastinadoed on his too impulsive soles. 
As for me — so doth the world move by contraries! — 
almost anything else in the factory compound interests 
me more than the windmill. The well-diggers, for in- 
stance, through whose dusty rags I first learned that 
khaki is a pure Persian word, meaning earth-coloured. 
Shall I be pedantic enough to add that the h is there for a 
reason, and that the Persians accent the last syllable? 
The piling up of mud pies into the new dye house chimney 
interests me, too, to say nothing of the beautiful groined 
vaulting of that house, in light brick. A Persian can do 
anything with earth, water, and his ten fingers, so sure in 
him is the inheritance of those who first devised the secret 
of the dome. The old dye house is also something to see, 
where huge copper kettles bubble over fires of poplar and 
tapeh. Nor are the dyes aniline that bubble in those 
kettles. They are alizarin, if you must know, against 
which no man can complain that they run or fade. If 
there be room for complaint, it is that the colours con- 
cocted by the ingenious Firengi out of coaltar and heaven 

178 



THE FACTORY 

knows what are not always the same as the colours which 
the Persians of the old time extracted from the herbs 
and barks of their own valleys. Many of them, that is, 
are not simple colours, such as the Orientals instinctively 
know how to put together, but complicated colours, veiled 
colours, shadows and ashes of colours, subtly calculated 
to soothe the neurasthenic souls of the West. But these 
are matters of which 1 am not competent to speak. I 
can only tell how the dripping hanks of wool are carried 
away to dry in a sun without veil or shadow. Then they 
are piled in a storehouse according to their kinds — in 
the care of an Armenian mtr:[a who has been to America, 
and who has brought back a hat and a twang. 

What interests me most, however, is the long low mud 
building where the wool goes last, to be snipped up and 
artfully knotted into patterns. The room where those 
patterns are plotted out is at the lighter and more public 
end of the house. Here black-capped mirias sit around a 
long table, busy over water-colours and sheets of squared 
paper and samples of dyed wool and pieces wickedly cut 
out of old rugs. The head of the designing room is a 
man of forty, perhaps, with a singular face, both dark and 
pale, distinguished and ravaged. He smokes a miskal 
of opium a day. But he can take one look at a carpet 
and reproduce it for you in water colour, with all the 
brightness and delicacy of the old miniatures. In fact, 
he paints miniatures himself, after that charming old 
Persian tradition which is not yet dead, mounting them 
on mats of cunningly contrasted colours, spattered with 
gold. So I am the more willing to take Mr. F. R. Mar- 
tin's word for it that Behzad and the other miniaturists 
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may have designed 

179 



PERSIAN miniatures; 

the magnificent carpets of the early Safevi period. The 
other mirias are younger, some of them no more than 
twelve or fifteen. The big mirias paint entire designs, 
in the exact colours which the weavers are to use — such 
designs as Persians have always painted, save when some 
Firengi desolates them by ordering a vast carpet which 
is nothing but a border around a central desert of pink 
or blue, empty and flowerless as a billiard board. The 
little mirias paint the actual working patterns, copying en- 
larged sections of the design on paper of which each square 
stands for a knot or a fixed number of knots. They all 
have lean, dark, intelligent-looking faces, and such thin, 
long, intelligent-looking fingers. After seeing the hands 
which so many Persians have I can understand how it is 
that so many beautiful things have come out of Persia, 
and how neither time nor misfortune • has been able 
quite to do away with the tradition of them. 

The greater part of the building is the factory proper. 
They tell me that it is the first establishment of its kind 
in Persia. People have always made rugs there, of course, 
but they have not always made them outside of their own 
homes; and least of all have women been accustomed to 
do so strange a thing. The thing was so strange, for a 
Firengi to think of building a great house and hiring wo- 
men to weave for him, and Persians are so sensitive about 
their women, that the affair had to be gone about very 
diplomatically. The Sheikh ul Islam, who is the chief 
religious functionary of a Persian town, had first to be 
approached with all possible deference and ceremony. 
He then had to call together his associates in the cult, 
and deliberate whether there were anything in law or 
divinity to forbid the proposed innovation. It was at 

i8o 



THE FACTORY 

last decided that the ladies of Hamadan might work for 
the Firengi without losing their reputations, in case the 
Firengi took due steps to insure their privacy. To this 
end all communication between the wool room and the 
room of the looms was limited to a hole in the wall, 
rather like a post-office slot. Furthermore, since the 
master weaver was a man, and since it was necessary for 
the Firengi or his deputies occasionally to make inspec- 
tions, a chaperon was appointed from among the elders of 
Hamadan. This chaperon is a man of God, of canonical 
age, who receives a stipend from the Firengi and whose 
duty it is to circulate among the looms for the mainte- 
nance of decorum and good manners and for the safeguard- 
ing of the honour of the husbands of Hamadan. For the 
greater peace of mind of the latter it is known that the 
master weaver is also a man of God, wearing the green 
turban of the seed of the Prophet and being addressed 
as Sheikh. He, as it happens, is no Hamadani, but 
from Tabriz. For you may be surprised to learn that 
Hamadan is not a city of weavers. It may once have 
been; but if it becomes so again, thanks will be due to 
the Firengi. 

I am happy to report that under these conditions no 
scandal has arisen to trouble the relations of East and 
West. There was, to be sure, the affair of a certain Mrs. 
Potiphar, who complained that an Armenian or Jewish 
miria had insulted her while handing out wool through 
the hole in the wall. This news caused an immediate 
exodus from the factory, and the Governor felt it necessary 
to make an investigation. The insult, however, was 
evidently too deep for words. While Mrs. Potiphar was 
unable to utter it, she did specify the day and the hour on 

i8i 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

which it passed through the slit of the wool room, as well 
as the name of the offending mirza. That, somehow or 
other, she knew! But, as it happened, Joseph was able 
to prove so good an alibi that the charge fell to the ground 
and the disquieted husbands allowed their wives to re- 
turn. 

Having been duly advised of these matters, I, as a 
friend of the manager, was permitted by the white- 
turbaned chaperon to visit the sacred precinct of the 
looms. I found there no whirring belts or clattering 
mechanisms of steel, as certain pessimistic writers on rugs 
had half led me to expect. In this factory, as in all others 
of its kind in Persia, there are no other belts than those 
encircling Persian waists, and only such motor power as 
works most efficiently on tea and pilau. There are, to 
be sure, rows of imposing looking appliances, of which 
the most imposing are the pairs of big poplar posts that 
contain the warp of a loom. The threads of this warp 
hang perpendicularly from a fixed transverse beam at the 
top to a movable transverse beam at the bottom, on 
which the rug is wound up as it grows in length. There is 
also a smaller transverse stick, running in and out be- 
tween the threads and separating them enough for the 
insertion of a hand shuttle which carries the thread of the 
woof between each row of knots. Add to this a pair of 
shears for cutting wool and a sort of heavy, iron-handled 
comb for beating down the knots and the cross threads, 
and you have all that is mechanical in the making of a 
rug. There remains only the narrow wooden platform 
on which the weavers squat and which if they like can 
climb the uprights, by means of pegs, as their work grows 
up the loom. 

182 



THE FACTORY 

The rest is a matter of clever Persian fingers. And how 
fast they can fly! They are all plentifully reddened with 
henna, I notice. So are the bare feet tucked up on the 
little platforms — the gay green slippers appertaining 
thereto, those humming-bird slippers I saw in the Bazaar, 
being neatly set out in rows on the mud floor below. The 
number of weavers varies, of course, according to the size 
of the rug, but each one has about a yard and a half to 
attend to. Every loom is in charge of an ustad, a fore- 
woman, who has the design in hand. She ties the bound- 
ary knots, telling her crew how many knots of such and 
such a colour to add. She is more than likely to have a 
baby crowing — on occasion read bawling — on the platform 
beside her, or on the mud floor among the slippers. Many 
of the weavers are no more than babies themselves, for 
that matter. I remember one pickaninny of eight or nine 
who giggled as the manager went by and pointed out a 
yellow chicken she had put into the blue border of a great 
carpet, between two stately flowerpots of flowers. The 
ustad was for making her ravel it out ; but the wise manager 
let it stay. Such irregularities are one of the charms of an 
Oriental rug — all too rare when measurements are taken 
and wool dyed evenly as it is here. And a pickaninny 
capable of inventing a chicken has weaving in her blood, 
even if Hamadan is not a city of weavers. These ladies 
seemed not too greatly distressed at the approach of per- 
sons of the designing sex. There would be a great twitch- 
ing up over the head of those loose white or coloured sheets 
which are the less formal shield of virtue, but there would 
also be craned necks and visions of a high olive cheek-bone 
or of a blistering black eye. And from the chatter shrill- 
ing between loom and loom it was evident that no one 

183 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

stood in too great awe of the turbaned censor of mor- 
als. 

The sex is always temperamental, but in this factory 
the unhappy manager is often put beside himself with the 
whims of the daughters of Iran. It is a very human trait, 
in all parts of the world, to take the line that the company 
is rich and can afford to stretch a point. Therefore no 
weaver ever takes the trouble to save wool, which is the 
most serious item of rug making. The different colours 
naturally have to be dyed in different hanks. To make a 
knot of a required colour a bit is cut off; when the knot is 
tied the two ends are cut again; and when the rug leaves 
the loom the rough surface has to be clipped smooth by an 
experienced hand. All this wastes a good deal of wool, 
which is practically useless because it is already dyed and 
too short to use again. But can you induce the women to 
cut off no more than they need to tie their knot? Never! 
Nor could the manager persuade them to use a pair of clip- 
pers he invented, to cut the knots of uniform length. The 
weavers have, too, a great way of borrowing wool from 
each other, and of not being too careful to get the colour 
they need, in order to save a journey to the hole in the 
wall. They have also been known to borrow wool from 
the factory and not to return it, carrying it off under their 
loose clothes when they go home at night. There conse- 
quently came a day when the decree went forth that each 
loom was to be provided with a box, containing wool 
enough for the carpet in hand, of which the ustad was 
to keep the key and to be allowed to take home the excess 
or compelled to make up any deficiency. This caused a 
terrible upheaval, being not only a reflection on a lady's 
honour but a reason to make her suspect that the factory 

184 



THE FACTORY 

intended to cheat her of her due amount of wool. At the 
end of that day some one wailed: ''Whoever comes to- 
morrow will have a bad name!" On the morrow, ac- 
cordingly, out of three hundred women, twenty came to 
work. And it took both time and argument to convince 
them that the manager really knew how much wool went 
into a carpet of a given size and would see that they got 
enough. 

What is less comprehensible is that they will not take 
care of the carpet they are weaving. The new mud roof 
of the factory leaked villainously, as a new mud roof will. 
The weavers regarded it as so much a matter of course that 
they would not take the trouble to report the presence of a 
pool under a loom or of the mildew which would gather on 
the rug above it. The consequence was that certain 
carpets were almost ruined before they were finished. 
Great pieces had to be cut out and knotted in again. I 
don't know whether the ustad foresaw more labour and 
therefore more pay for herself. The working of the fem- 
inine mind is past finding out. 

Another time a long slash was discovered in the middle 
of a carpet that had been months on the loom. The 
manager at once caused it to be announced that no one 
would be paid until he found out who had cut that carpet. 
At first nobody believed him; but when the painful fact 
became plain that he meant what he said, information was 
taken him that a certain Mrs. Angel had done the wicked 
deed, a certain Mrs. Parrot having been witness thereof. 
On interrogation, both Mrs. Angel and Mrs. Parrot denied 
knowledge of any carpet cutting. Tears and outcries 
followed, and loud general demands for pay withheld. 
The manager stood firm, however — until Mrs. Angel 

185 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

went so far as to admit that she had incited Mrs. Parrot 
to slash the carpet. Mrs. Parrot indignantly repudiated 
the insinuation. More tears and more lamentations! 
And at last the force of public opinion compelled Mrs. 
Angel to confess herself the culprit. Having a grudge 
against Mrs. Parrot, she had thought to settle it by de- 
facing the latter's carpet. "But what can the Firengi 
do to me?" she boastfully demanded of her companions. 
What the Firengi did to her was to dock her of ten tomans 
of her pay. He then called in the elderly chaperon, who 
gave her a wigging of the first class and applied twenty- 
five stripes to her peccant hands, she sobbing out at each 
blow: "I was at fault!" If the Firengi had wielded the 
switch, there might have been a massacre in Hamadan. 
As it was, Mr. Angel saw to it that Mrs. Angel worked 
out her ten tomans. And after that there was no more 
carpet slashing. 

Wherein the weavers most fill the heart of the Firengi 
with tdespair is their capriciousness about turning up at 
the factory. He has room for seven hundred of them, 
but he is happy if he can find half that number at the 
looms on any given day. Not angels, powers, or princi- 
palities, not even the censor of morals, can induce them 
to work six days a week, rest on Friday, and then come 
back for six days more. A religious anniversary falls due, 
a visitor comes to call, they are invited to a picnic, or a 
husband pinches their cheek, and they stay at home — while 
their carpet hangs idle on the loom and dealers in Firengi- 
stan telegraph angrily about delays in filling contracts. 
They- like money as much as any one; but a toman in 
hand is worth ten in the cashier's safe. Threats, bonuses, 
the most glittering picture of the advantageous position 

1 86 



THE FACTORY 

of the capitalist, are nothing to them. It is, of course, a 
thing to turn the hair gray. But do you know? In 
my secret heart I fear I am on the side of the weavers. 

One day the compound was all agog, for His Highness 
the Governor came to inspect the factory. He deigned 
to admire the dye house, the store house, the designing 
room, the wool room, Mrs. Potiphar's slit in the wall, Mrs. 
Angel's loom, everything. Most of all, I think, he admired 
the windmill from Chicago. And just as he was going 
away an old forewoman burst out in front of him. 

"The Firengi — what God does will! — gives us bread," 
she cried out inconveniently. "What are you going to 
do for us? Will you make it cheaper?" 

What he did for them, poor wretch, was to fly for his 
life. 



187 



XII 
THE SATRAP 

Noble and mild this Persian seems to he, 

If outward habit judge the inward man. 

Christopher Marlowe: the tragedy of tamburlaine the great 

THE Governor's palace is outwardly indistin- 
guishable as such. One entrance of it, to be 
sure, opens on a small square, which is generally 
full of drying towels from a public bath. The 
entrance we made for was at the bottom of a blind alley, 
whence an inner lane bounded by high mud walls led to a 
second gateway. Here lounged a company of rather 
slouchy-looking individuals who regarded us with some 
uncertainty. For although we had conformed to the 
etiquette of the country in making an appointment for our 
audience, we had been simple enough to think, being 
three men sound of wind and limb, that we needed no pro- 
tecting retinue at our heels. However, we indisputably 
wore hats, which proved us to be persons of a certain 
degree of consequence. Accordingly a gentleman in a 
dirty red coat, carrying a silver-headed mace, wished us 
peace and led us into a courtyard with a big oblong pool 
in the centre of it, up a steep flight of stone steps at the 
farther end of the court, through a high talary and to the 
door of an anteroom. More slouchy-looking persons 
lounged about it, having rather the aspect of masters 

188 



THE SATRAP 

of the pen than of the sword. In their hands Silverstick 
abandoned us, to be divested of our hats, coats, and ga- 
loshes — most indispensable article of attire in Persia, 
where everybody takes off his shoes before going into the 
house. We were then passed by a sentry with a fixed 
bayonet over his shoulder into a second anteroom. More 
loungers — some mirias, some interviewing them on affairs 
of state. One of the mirias knocked softly at an inner 
door, and we were admitted into the presence of the Satrap 
himself. 

East and West were curiously mingled in the sanctum 
of His Highness. The L-shaped room was carpeted with 
big rugs, the white walls of it were broken by niches suc- 
ceeding each other at regular intervals, the windows that 
looked out on the court and the big pool were multitudi- 
nously glazed with those little Persian panes. Above them 
were smaller windows of stained glass whose larger square 
panes stood on their corners, diamondwise. The Satrap, 
however, while younger than a Satrap should be and 
dressed in a tight Persian coat with official brass buttons, 
sat not on the floor but on a chair, behind nothing less 
exotic than a desk of new Persia. Old Persia sat beside 
him, albeit on another chair, in the person of a Seid, a 
descendant €)f the Prophet, with a round gray beard and 
a green turban. But this benevolent personage did not 
disdain to follow the example of His Highness and shake 
our polluting hands. 

What struck me most was His Highness's excellent Eng- 
lish. 1 knew he was not a very distant cousin of the Shah 
and a member of the same Kajar tribe that seized the 
throne of Persia after the death of Nadir Shah, in the 
period of our own revolution. I did not know until he 

189 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

told us so that this Perso-Turkoman prince had been 
educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. And there, among 
other sciences, he acquired that of football! But he was 
highly amused by the Sah'b's suggestion that he take part 
in the matches got up by the Englishmen of Hamadan. 
He said he might think about it if the games were played 
behind a wall instead of in an open field. That the Reis 
himself, manager of the Bank and regarded by the Per- 
sians as the official chief of our colony, could so far forget 
his dignity as to muddy himself in these ignoble scrim- 
mages, was no doubt an inexplicable mystery to the black 
hats who used to crowd the side lines. 

On His Highness's table my wandering eye was not 
slow to detect a copy of the London Times. Shall I 
confess that I was rude enough to wonder if, by any chance, 
it might be our own — which had failed to arrive by the last 
post? All our telegrams, at any rate, pass under His 
Highness's eye before reaching their destination. Letters 
are rather too numerous and too strangely written. Be- 
sides, as they come from Baku and travel up country over 
the Russian road, the Russians might have something to 
say about that. But it is a perpetual mystery what be- 
comes of so many copies of the Times, to say nothing of so 
many more copies of the Graphic and other illustrated 
papers. And whenever they fail to turn up we somehow 
think of the Governor — though we do not forget, either, 
that the Postmaster has a fair knowledge of the Roman 
alphabet. 

As the old gentleman in the green turban lacked the 
Satrap's gift of tongues. His Highness was perfectly safe in 
confiding to us that he detested Hamadan, finding it the 
worst city in Persia. He suspected me of trying to pro- 

190 



THE SATRAP 

duce some belated good manners when I told him that I 
liked Hamadan very much, and that one of the things I 
liked most about it was the lack of trams and carriages. 
He answered that he had hopes of widening and paving 
certain of the principal streets — and he has since done so, 
I hear to my regret. In the meantime he announced to 
us one innovation he had in mind, namely an edict to the 
effect that every citizen should thereafter hang a lantern 
outside his house at night. But we later had occasion to 
notice that the Hamadanis were not too prompt in re- 
sponding to this recommendation. Indeed I blush to add 
that our own lane might have been full of thieves, wolves, 
and every manner of obscure deed, for all we did to illum- 
inate its darkness. 

Harrow and Sandhurst may be partly responsible for 
these enlightened notions. I fancy, though, that the illus- 
trious example of His Highnesses Papa entered into the 
matter. This powerful personage is himself a Satrap, and 
a greater one, who not only has widened the streets of his 
own capital and embellished them with public buildings, 
but who maintains one of the best brass bands in Asia, 
capable of executing Bizet, Sousa, or even Irving Berlin for 
all I know. I never had the pleasure of listening to it. I 
have, however, had the pleasure of hearing many stories 
about this musically inclined old gentleman, who is warden 
of the Mesopotamian marches. I never took in before I 
went there that Persia is propped up so high above the 
rest of the world, or that part of the world which lies to the 
west of it. To climb into this country of the sky is never 
a simple matter, as they know best who have travelled from 
the Persian Gulf to Shiraz. On the west there are only 
two places where the thing can be done with any ease. 

191 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

One of them is in the north, near Lake Urumia, where the 
old caravan trail went from Trebizond to Tabriz. The 
other is the older and steeper caravan trail which threads 
the passes of the Zagros range between Baghdad, or Khani- 
kin, and Kermanshah. The trans-Caucasian railway has 
taken away the glory of the Trebizond-Tabriz route, 
about which Xenophon knew something, and which Marco 
Polo travelled in his day. But the Baghdad-Kermanshah 
route is still the one — or was before the war — by which 
English and Indian cottons and teas, after sailing up the 
Tigris to Baghdad, transship themselves to camel back and 
climb the ladders of Persia. Now those passes are not 
only the borderland between Mesopotamia and Persia, 
but they are also the borderland between two of the most 
redoubtable tribes in Persia, the Kurds and the Lurs. 
These good people have a habit of pouncing down on 
caravans, as they wend their toilsome way through the 
stony defiles, and of either pillaging them to the quick or 
extorting frorri them a ransom of so much a camel. The 
current rate before the war ran from six to twelve krans 
an animal. It is whispered, however, that the musical 
warden of the marches is not altogether a stranger to 
these operations, and that he is capable of taking from the 
tribesmen his fifty to ninety per cent, of the proceeds of 
their enterprise. 

Picturesque as these operations are, they are looked at 
somewhat coldly by the English, whose Persian trade in 
the four years before the war fell off $1,000,000 — notwith- 
standing the fact that they are said to pay Satrap Senior 
30,000 tomans a year to keep the passes open. On the 
other hand, the Russians are said to pay him 60,000 
tomans a year to keep the passes closed ! When things get 

192 



THE SATRAP 

too difficult for him he resigns. And then no one gets 
through the passes at all, for love or money. He is there- 
upon reappointed, as he was for the eighth time while I was 
in Hamadan. During the same year the English paid the 
Lurs a matter of £400 to let alone a party of engineers who 
wanted to survey a possible route for a railway between 
the Karun, the only navigable river in Persia, and a town 
in the region of Kermanshah called Khorremabad. Where- 
upon some one else paid the Lurs more to keep the sur- 
veyors out. At any rate, they broke their agreement with 
the English. Another highly interesting example of the 
working, under the old regime, of the Anglo- Russian 
Agreement of 1907 — and perhaps of the Potsdam Agree- 
ment of 19 10. 

I do not pretend to know whether these things be true. 
I am merely quoting current gossip — which further re- 
ports that Satrap Senior is an exceedingly well-to-do and 
exceedingly thrifty old gentleman. He maintains, never- 
theless, as becomes a prince of the blood and a warden of 
marches, a standing army of his own. And whenever he 
takes the field with his army at his heels it is miraculous 
how quickly the passes open — not to mention how gener- 
ous the mountain chiefs become of their flocks and herds. 
As for Satrap Junior, he suffers under the double disad- 
vantage of being a much younger man than the Kara- 
Gozlu grandees of Hamadan and of having no profitable 
passes under his jurisdiction. At any rate, the Russians 
have kindly relieved him of the responsibilities of Sultan 
Bulagh. He complained bitterly to us that he had a 
budget of only 500 tomans a month, out of which he could 
not possibly defray his personal expenses, let alone beauti- 
fying the town. It was not he, however, who told us the 

193 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

tale of his bodyguard of twenty horsemen. Emulous no 
doubt of his celebrated parent, he sent in to the Reis- 
i-Malieh, the local representative of the Treasury Depart- 
ment, a bill for the pay and upkeep of fifty cavaliers. The 
Reis-i-Malieh, who is one of Mr. Shuster's old lieutenants 
and an honest man, asked first to see a review of the troop. 
The troop was accordingly reviewed, and among its mem- 
bers the Reis-i-Malieh and his friends recognised various 
rowdies and idlers of the Bazaar. These, being privately 
questioned, replied without any hesitation that they had 
been offered five krans apiece to appear on that place and 
day, mounted, in order to swell the Satrap's train. The 
Reis-i-Malieh therefore refused to honour the requisition 
of His Highness — who thought best not to press his claim. 
So who shall say that Mr. Shuster went to Persia in vain! 
As my two companions were interested in rugs, the 
conversation turned to that topic. The Satrap professed 
a desire to follow in the footsteps of his illustrious father, 
who had so forwarded the manufacture of rugs in Kerman- 
shah. He added that the weavers there are not women 
but men and boys, who instead of working from a painted 
pattern follow instructions that are sung to them by a 
foreman, in some old technical language which is no longer 
understood outside the profession. At this the Sah'b 
and his friend looked so flabbergasted that I rushed in 
where they feared to tread and asked His Highness if he 
collected rugs. My question diverted him as much as 
if I had asked the Mayor of Brockton if he collected boots. 
For I had yet to learn that rugs are as much a matter of 
course in Persia as kolas. Everybody has them, from the 
richest to the poorest, and nobody sentimentalises over 
them. And I also had yet to learn why the Sah'b looked 

194 



THE SATRAP 

so flabbergasted when His Highness spoke of the rugs of 
Kermanshah. But that you shall not learn till the next 
chapter. 

In the meantime we were served two rounds of tea, in 
European cups, but without the European horror of 
cream. Those cups, I suppose, were instituted for the 
peace of mind of the old Setd, who drank his tea out 
of a glass in the proper way, distracted by no doubt as 
to whether his second glass had been defiled by Christian 
lips. Then we took leave, without asking permission to 
do so in the ceremonious Persian way — and without being 
assured, in consequence, that His Highness's house had 
been purified by our presence, his ills forgotten, or his 
fortune increased. 

There followed an awful moment in the anteroom, when 
after being inducted into our hats, coats, and galoshes, 
we discovered that we could scrape up between us no 
more than seventeen krans for tips. These, nevertheless, 
we bestowed upon the attendant underlings with an air of 
immense generosity. But the worst was that we had 
nothing left for Silverstick, who stalked majestically in 
front of us, clearing a way with his mace through a crowd 
of moss-troopers at the gate and escorting us as far as 
the square. His expression, on parting from Firengis 
who were too poor to be accompanied by so much as one 
servant or to find in their pockets so much as one kran 
for the Governor's gate-keeper, was something to re- 
member. 

As for the Satrap, he never returned our call. He no 
doubt heard the report of Silverstick, and took the Sah'b 
for one of his own clerks. 



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XIII 

ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

(BUT TO BE SKIPPED BY THOSE WHO NEITHER READ NOR 
WRITE THEM.) 

A judge at common law may he an ordinary man; a good judge 
of a carpet must he a genius. 

Edgar Allan Poe: philosophy of furniture 



WHENEVER we are hard up for amuse- 
ment — as may happen even in royal 
Ecbatana, since Alexander went away — 
we turn over our rug books. Of these 
we have quite a collection. For the Sah'b is himself a 
man of rugs; and when a new book about them appears, 
as is sure to happen once a twelve-month, the good people 
at home send him out a copy. I don't think he ever 
bought one on his own account — in English. But they 

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ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

help to console him for the fact that only one copy in three 
of Life or Punch reaches us. What can we do? Our 
destiny has given us to know from our youth up a quantity 
of simple matters which to this day remain dark to most 
writers of rug books. And man must laugh. At any rate, 
I must confess that we fmd it impossible to take these 
volumes very seriously: not even the fattest and most 
expensive of them, whose authors' names are pronounced 
in whispers by all ladies in America. They remind us too 
much of Babu English, and of what Persians say about 
our own side of the world. 

There are, of course, rug books and rug books. It is 
not for a light-minded nomad to mock at the famous 
Austrian folios, at Bode, Martin, or Strzygowski, or even 
at Mr. J. K. Mumford. Mr. Mumford is by no means 
infallible. But his limitations have been those of oppor- 
tunity, rather than of good faith. To him alone is due, in 
our country, the credit of having made some sort of order 
out of a picturesque chaos. He inquired, he studied, he 
travelled; and his book remains the most informing that 
has hitherto been published in America. If he pays the 
penalty, so does he deserve the glory, of the pioneer. And 
I hereby offer him a humble tribute of respect for having 
blazed out a way which many followers have done almost 
nothing to widen. 

Having acquitted one's conscience of this debt of honour 
one is bound to add that if we take Mr. Mumford down, 
on those dark days when Life and Punch fail to 
turn up, it is chiefly for certain inessential items of infor- 
mation which he lets drop. As for the flock of which he 
is the spiritual father, I grant that they generally give more 
practical information, wherever they got it, than their 

197 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

cousins oversea, who love to bring forth sumptuous tomes 
more enlightening with regard to the myth of the Golden 
Fleece or the tomb of louiya and Touiyou than to the 
knots and knottinesses of rugs. But it is hard to escape 
the conviction that without Mr. Mumford the names of 
few of these ladies and gentlemen would ever have seen 
print. What enables them to get away with it, as the 
saying so expressively goes, is the great popularity of Orien- 
tal rugs in our country, and the greater ignorance of the 
countries from which they come^. These authors have, of 
course, their own regroupings and emendations. But 
either the literature to which they contribute is a new 
proof of an old saying about great minds, or one recognises 
again and again Mr. Mumford's general plan, Mr. Mum- 
ford's facts, Mr. Mumford's textile tables, and Mr. Mum- 
ford's mistakes, down to his very quotations and turns of 
phrase. Or was it already an established jargon of the 
trade to abound in "conceits," and never to fail to say of 
a border stripe that it ''carries" such and such a design? 
At all events, whenever I come across a reference to Pro- 
fessor Goodyear, to Owen Jones, or to Sir George Birdwood 
— he who had the courage to write at the top of a learned 
sheaf of paper "The Termless Antiquity of Integral 
Identity of the Oriental Manufacture of Sumptuary 
Carpets!" — 1 can't help asking myself if the author knows 
any more of the works in question than he gleaned from 
the pages"of Mr. Mumford. But it is not because any 
of them ever so much as breathe the name of their ghostly 
parent. "For fifteen years," says Mr. Mumford in the 
preface to his fourth edition, " I have persistently 'winked 
at 'Omer down the road,' and "Omer' has never once 
'winked back.'" 

198 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 



To make a complete catalogue of the misinformation 
which the rug fraternity hand on from one to another 
would need *'a painful man with his pen, and as much 
patience as he had, who wrote the Lives and Deaths of 
the Martyrs.'* A characteristic if mild example is the 
name Yuruk,* applied to a certain class of Turkish rugs 
and translated with astonishing unanimity by our authori- 
ties as meaning mountaineer. Whereas the real word is 
Yiiriik; and while some mountaineers are Yiirtiks, all 
Yiiriiks are by no means mountaineers. For the name 
literally signifies a man who walks : i. e., a nomad. A more 
complicated case is that of the napless carpets known in 
Persia as gilim and in Turkey as kilim. None of the rug 
books seem to be aware of this simple fact, and their spell- 
ings suffer accordingly. They all mention, however, a 
variety which they call kts kilim. I, for one, have never 
heard of it outside of a rug book or a rug shop. One 
reason, perhaps, is that there is no such word in Persian 
or Turkish as kis. Mr. Mumford explains a kis kilim as 
being a winter covering, thereby leading one to suspect 
that his informant was a Smyrniote. God has gifted the 
Levantine merchants of Polycarp's city with eloquent and 
with ingenious tongues, but not with tongues that are 
able to pronounce the Turkish language. Kish kilimi 
should be the true term — if it actually exits. But Mr. 
Mumford's followers, taking a little further counsel, 
inform us that a kis kilim is a girl rug, to which they attach 
an affecting history of dowries and what not. And they 



*For the spelling followed in this book, see the last two paragraphs of the 
introduction. 

199 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

are equally wrong, since the word to which they refer 
should be kt:^, with a vowel sound that neither a Greek nor 
an American can pronounce. You pays your money and 
you takes your choice. 

Not so incorrect, perhaps, but more misleading, is a 
whole family of words which our authors quote in classify- 
ing rugs according to their uses. Thus they tell us that 
the long rugs technically known as runners were originally 
intended for divan covers; and they make quite a story 
of the arrangement of an Oriental interior, dragging in 
the classic triclinium and fixing the places of greater and 
of lesser honour on rugs of different sorts. I have no 
doubt that Mr. Mumford has seen Turkish rooms sur- 
rounded on three sides by divans, and divans covered with 
runners; but I doubt very much whether he ever saw any- 
thing of the sort in Persia or other parts of the East that 
are farther from Western influences. Nor can the allu- 
sion to the triclinium be otherwise than imaginative when 
the habit of the Near East is to eat on the floor, squatting 
about little round tables six or eight inches high. The real 
origin of the runner was probably in the tradition of the 
tent. In Persia particularly sets of rugs are quite com- 
mon, of the same pattern and colour, consisting of one 
large carpet, of one runner as long as that carpet is wide, 
and of two more runners whose length is equal either to 
that of the carpet or to that of the carpet plus the width 
of the first runner. Such a set is called, like a team of 
horses, a dasteh, literally a handful; and its purpose is for 
furnishing tents or rooms of different sizes with the same 
rugs, piecing out the carpet when necessary with the ac- 
companying runners. Mr. Mumford's name for those 
runners, makatlik, has justly been discarded by his suc- 

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ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

cessors, who give them their true name of kenart. Ma- 
katlik, as the word should be, may roughly be translated 
as sofa covering, and kenari as bordering — from kenar, 
edge, which is common to Persian and Turkish alike. 

As for the so-called odjalik or odjaklik, which I would 
correct and simplify as ojakUk, many descant on its place 
in Oriental hospitality, though no one attempts to fix its 
place with relation to those doubtful divans. It means, 
if you insist, a hearth rug. But I question if many of 
them can have been made for that purpose, for the simple 
reason that nothing is rarer in an Oriental house than a 
hearth. The cooking is done when possible outside, in 
the open or in a detached kitchen, while for heating, fire- 
places are much less popular than a device which I have 
already mentioned, called in Persian a kurst. If a rug 
were used in connection with it, the last thing a guest 
would be invited to do would be to take his place thereon. 
At night, however, he would be given such a rug to sleep 
on, and perhaps another for a quilt. So most of your 
hearth rugs, good people, are nothing more or less than beds. 

The various other words ending in lik which Mr. Mum- 
ford was the first to introduce are not much more trust- 
worthy. In the first place, they are all taken from the 
Ottoman Turkish language, and therefore do not apply 
to weaves from other countries. In the second place, 
that lik must be accepted with discretion, being a suffix 
something like our own suffix -ing. Hehhelik, for in- 
stance, must be accepted with double discretion because 
it should be heihelik and because heiheh alone means 
saddle bag — heihelik meaning, among other things, the 
material out of which saddle bags are made. And, in the 
third place, the vowel sound of that suffix undergoes varia- 

201 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

tions which this is not the place to explain but which the 
rug books never indicate. Misleading in another way is 
the so-called hammamlik, or bath rug; for while rugs may 
be found in the dressing rooms of baths, they are never of 
any one class, nor are they ever used, as the rug books 
affirm, in any part of a Turkish bath, at any rate, where they 
come in contact with soap and water. Still more mislead- 
ing, however, is the term turhehlik. It does not mean a 
grave rug, nor do the people of the Near East leave rugs in 
cemeteries. What they very frequently do is to leave rugs 
as votive offerings in mausoleums, which are much com- 
moner than with us and which go in Turkish by the name 
of tiirheh. Thus the so-called grave rug is really identical 
with the so-called Mecca rug, which is often a prayer 
rug but which the more discerning of our authors recog- 
nise as forming no distinct species. 

The most serious of this family of errors is the one re- 
lating to the word sedjadeh — or sejjadeh, as I would prefer 
to spell it. Mr. Mumford's disciples have improved upon 
him in certain minor details, but no one of them has ever 
yet discovered that a sejjadeh and what they unidiomatic- 
ally term a namailik are both one and the same — namely, 
a prayer rug. This is a case where a little knowledge of 
Oriental languages is good for writing about matters 
Oriental. For sejjadeh is derived from the Arabic root 
meaning worship, and by no means signifies a carpet of 
medium size. It may, however, be a carpet of medium 
size, or of the largest possible size. Many Turkish mos- 
ques contain huge Ushak carpets whose design consists of 
a multitude of pointed panels. Such a carpet is as much 
a sejjadeh as a small rug of one panel. But to say of the 
latter that every Mohammedan carries one around with 

202 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

him, or so much as owns one, is absurd. If that were 
true, prayer rugs would be commoner than any other kind 
of a rug. Which is far from being the case. 

Of all the gibberish that has been written on this sub- 
ject, it would be hard to fmd more crowded into one page 
than may be read in Dr. G. G. Lewis's ** Practical Book of 
Oriental Rugs" (2d ed., p. 321). After the usual remark 
about every Mohammedan possessing his own prayer rug, 
the author goes on to say : '' By means of a small compass 
he spreads his rug so that the mihrab or niche points 
toward Mecca, where Mohammed's body lies. Then 
after removing all money and jewellery from his person, 
in order to appear before God in the most abject humility, 
he combs his beard, produces a rosary of ninety-nine 
beads and a dried cake of earth which came from Mecca. 
These he places just under the niche and then, resting his 
head on the earth with his hands outstretched on either 
side, he performs his devotions. The mihrab or niche 
on which the worshipper places his head represents the 
door of a mosque and reminds those who use it of the 
sacred mosque at Mecca." And elsewhere Dr. Lewis 
propounds the alternative theory that the mihrab ''is 
supposed to imitate the form of the Mihrab in the temple 
at Mecca" (p. 121), and that the so-called comb designed 
on some Turkish prayer rugs is ''an emblem of the Moham- 
medan faith to remind the devout that cleanliness is next 
to godliness" (p. 108). 

Now hardly one of these statements is true. Com- 
passes are sometimes carried by pilgrims and travellers, 
but so rarely that the different directions in which they 
pray is one of the stock matters of pleasantry among 
Mohammedans. Far rarer is that precious cake of dried 

203 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

earth from Mecca; and the preparations for prayer have 
more to do with running water than with a comb, which 
most decidedly is not an emblem of the Mohammedan 
faith. Neither are you ever likely to see a rosary of 
ninety-nine beads — though you might see one of sixty-six 
beads. The common number is thirty-three. But the 
rosary plays no part in the rite of the prayer rug; and when 
used its place is in the owner's hand, which at no moment 
of his devotions does he stretch out from his side. Nor 
does he remove money and jewellery from his person, un- 
less they happen to be gold and he happens to be extremely 
orthodox. That is why so many fme Oriental stones are 
set in silver. As for the procedure of prayer, the devotee 
first stands, then drops to his knees, and finally prostrates 
himself, repeating these three positions a different number 
of times according to circumstances. And the pointed 
panel of the prayer tug neither represents the door of a 
mosque nor the mihrab of the temple at Mecca. The 
temple at Mecca contains no mihrah, being itself the centre 
of the axes of the Mohammedan world. Moreover, Mo- 
hammed, as it happens, is buried in Medina. What the 
panel of a prayer rug represents, if anything, is the mihrab 
of an ordinary mosque — a niche roughly corresponding to 
the altar of a church; and the finest of single-panelled 
rugs were made to put into such a niche. Most devotees 
content themselves with any kind of carpet or matting to 
pray on — or even their own coats, if other con venienceslack. 
Do you wonder, then, that rug books are capable of 
affording us a kind of pleasure that their authors never 
intended? On the whole, I think Dr. Lewis is our favour- 
ite. He is also the favourite of those who buy rug books, 
if one may judge from the fact that he went in two years 

204 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

into two editions. And his book would have deserved its 
title if he had only taken the trouble to make it accurate 
and consistent. As it is, how can we keep straight faces 
when he talks about Greek Mohammedans (p. 222), or 
reveals to us that a talismanic triangle is often tattooed on a 
Turk's body (p. 1 37), or says that green is a favourite colour 
of Persian rug makers (p. 79), or announces that a dog is 
considered in the Near East a sacred animal (p. no), or 
emits such samples of Turkish as she is spoke as ubrech 
and sechrudisih — for ihrik (pitcher) and stchan dishi (rat's 
or mouse's tooth)? The pearl of this collection, however, 
is his statement that lule, or luleh, of all words the most 
mystifying to his brothers of the craft, is "a corruption of 
the Persian word 'roulez,' meaning 'jewel'" (p. 349; cf. 
163). Some Armenian rug dealer must have stuck a 
fluent tongue in a capacious cheek when he achieved that 
etymology — for I would gladly entertain the hypothesis 
that it did not burst from the brain of Dr. Lewis. So far 
as I am able to learn, there is no word in Persian which 
remotely resembles roulei. There is a word lulu, which 
is a less common word for pearl; and in another place Dr. 
Lewis provides the form roules with that meaning. But 
luleh is no corruption of it — nor, as Mr. Mumford avers, 
of the French roulei, though he is on the right track. 
Luleh is a word which both in Persian and in Turkish 
means pipe or tube. And it is applied not only to Bijar 
but to any smallish carpets which are too heavy to be 
folded when out of use, and are therefore rolled. 



On matters of geography and spelling I am willing to 
touch the more lightly, knowing how far the East is from 

205 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

the West and how recalcitrant the English alphabet to 
render its own sounds, let alone those of other languages. 
But after all libraries do exist, containing fairly reliable 
books of reference. And even in New York and Philadel- 
phia, whence emanate most of these instructive works, 
there dwell orientalists of repute, who might conceivably 
have information to impart. Yet our authors seem to 
prefer to consult, if not one another, then the Armenian 
rug dealer around the corner, or haply some traveller re- 
turned alive from what they invariably term "the Orient.'* 
Thus we learn from Mr. W. D. Ellwanger of the most 
accessible region of "the Orient'' that "most of the rugs 
of commerce in this country come from Persia, Turkey, 
Asia Minor, Turkestan ..." ("The Oriental Rug," 
p. 13.) Is a surprised reader wrong in drawing the infer- 
ence that Turkey and Asia Minor are supposed to have 
no connection with each other? Of the latter Dr. Lewis 
informs us that it is bounded "on the south by Arabia, 
the Mediterranean and Red Seas" (p. 342). And Ana- 
tolia is usually spoken of as if it existed in some fourth 
dimension entirely outside the peninsula in question. 
Whereas the name is merely the Greek one for Asia Minor 
— from which the Turks derive their Anadol. 

It is perhaps not unnatural that the rug-geographer 
becomes more involved in obscurity as he penetrates 
farther into "the Orient." Kurdistan, for instance, is 
to him a constant stumbling block — as indeed it is to 
most westerners, who do not readily take in the conception 
of that Asiatic Poland, with its loosely related, semi- 
independent tribes living partly under Persian and partly 
under Turkish suzerainty, and producing within a few 
miles of each other such totally different weaves as the 

206 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

Bijar and the "Sehna/' So does Dr. Lewis find it in him 
to say that "the southern part of Armenia is called 
Kurdistan'' (p. 218). Of Persia proper I have read as- 
tounding things, of which not the least astounding is that 
no one but Mr. Mumford seems to recognise Iran as the 
name by which the Persians at this moment designate their 
own country. Whence will appear the true beauty of 
giving that name, as dealers and rug books love to do, 
to a certain class of rugs from the province of Irak Ajemi. 
And even Mr. Mumford opens the preface of his fourth 
edition with the strange information that "the past 
decade has witnessed in Persia the downfall of a dynasty, 
and indeed of the throne itself. The oldest of empires 
has been for a space the newest of republics. . . '* 
While elsewhere (p. 165) he says "that the Persian of 
to-day is a transplanted Turk, that the language used 
over the greater part of the empire is a peculiar form of 
Turkish, and that the pure Persian, the Iranian, is a rara 
avis in the land whose name he bears.'* The pure Persian 
is no doubt as rare a bird as the pure Italian, say, or the 
pure Christian. But while the reigning dynasty is of Turko- 
man origin, and while a Turkish dialect is spoken in 
Azerbaijan and — to a lesser extent — in the neighbourhood 
of Hamadan, the vast majority of Persians neither under- 
stand it nor are transplanted Turks. Mr. Mumford's 
mistakes, however, usually lie in a too broad application 
of a particular fact. He would be incapable of announc- 
ing like Dr. Lewis, and of twice repeating, that Laristan 
and Luristan are identical (pp. 202, 349, 350). 

As for Turkestan and the Caucasus, they might as 
well be Mars and the moon. I cannot deny that the 
Caucasus is politically a part of Russia — though I would 

207 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

not stake my head on the certainty of its so remaining to 
the end of time. But no Russian ever made a rug, or 
least of all a Yuriik rug, as Mr. Ellwanger seems to inti- 
mate (p. 63). Nor, as the rug books inform us with 
wonderful unanimity, is Kazak a corruption of Cossack, 
the case being exactly the contrary. And if the Caucasus 
be Russia, so are the trans-Caspian provinces. To call 
them so, at any rate, would save the rug-scriveners from 
the No Man's Land they make of that vast and little- 
visited region. You would think, to read their classifica- 
tions, that east of the Caspian one name is good as an- 
other, and that it is all the same whether you say Bokhara, 
Merv, Khiva, Samarkand, or Turkestan. 

In the finer points of orthography the rug book people 
are not wholly to blame for the fantastic things they do. 
Englishmen and Americans have always been notorious 
for the liberties they take with foreign names. But there 
is more than a suspicion of unscholarliness in the unsys- 
tematic spelling of these books, their general failure to 
give a key to their own pronunciation, and the importance 
they attribute to variant forms. Dr. Lewis perhaps ex- 
presses their general state of mind when he confides to us 
(p. 341, note) that "in the Turkish and Persian languages 
the vowels are frequently silent and the characters do 
not stand for single consonants, but represent combina- 
tions of sounds as in short-hand, so that the same word 
IS spelled in a great variety of ways when it is translated 
into English ..." Mark that "translated''! It is 
true that the Arabic alphabet is short of vowels, and that 
the different races who use it twist it as variously as do 
the people of Europe the long-suffering Roman alphabet. 
But neither in Persian nor in Turkish are there short-hand 

208 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

combinations of consonants — unless the same thing may 
be said of Greek and Russian, which are richer than 
English in having single letters to represent such sounds 
as th or sh. The bottom of the matter is that neither 
Dr. Lewis nor any one else will take the trouble to fmd 
out how a name is pronounced in its own country, and to 
choose a consistent method of rendering that name in 
English. Thus it is that the author of "The Practical 
Book of Oriental Rugs'' encumbers his pages with a 
quantity of so called synonyms, which are nothing but 
variant — and usually very incorrect — spellings he has 
chanced to pick up. A case in point is the town of Elisa- 
vetpol, in the Transcaucasus, whose older name of Ganja 
or Genjeh has caused fountains of ink to flow. Dr. Lewis 
calls the rugs of this district Genghis, which he directs us 
to pronounce Jen'-gis, giving as "synonyms" Guenja, 
Guendja, and Guenjes. He goes on to state that "author- 
ities differ greatly as to the origin of the name. Some say 
that the proper name should be Guenja, which was the 
ancient name of Elizabethpol, from whence they came. 
Others insist that they should be called Genghis, which 
is the name of the tribe of Nomads living in the vicinity 
of Elizabethpol who weave them*' (p. 267). If Dr. Lewis 
had thought fit to consult other authorities than his pred- 
ecessors in the American literature of rugs, one or two 
of whom relate "Genghis'' to the conqueror Chingiz Khan, 
he would very easily have found out that Ganja is a 
perfectly well-known town, founded by Kobad I, Sasanian 
king of Persia, in the fifth or sixth century of our era, 
and famous as the birthplace of the Persian poet Nizami, 
who wrote the epics of "Khosrev and Shirin" and "Majnun 
and Leila". He would also have found out that the elusive 

209 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

vowel sounds of that Persian name — which is used to this 
day by thousands of Caucasians — vary between a and e, 
and that a final / is a Persian and Azeri Turkish suffix of 
origin, equivalent to the Ottoman Turkish li — by which 
Mr. Mumford not too correctly designates a man of 
Hamadan. A man or a thing from Hamadan is locally 
termed Hamadani. And so, by a perfectly comprehensi- 
ble contraction, Ganji or Genji. Which, about as nearly, 
as can be arrived at in English, is the correct form. 

Of Hamadan itself Dr. Lewis gives the baroque "syno- 
nyms" Hamadie and Hamidieh. Where in the world 
he fished up Hamadie I can't imagine; but Hamidieh is a 
Turkish adjective made out of the name Hamid, having 
no more to do with Hamadan then our own adjective 
Augustan. Diverting as his "synonyms'' are, however, it 
is when we come to the glossary at the end of his book that 

the rafters of Ecbatana Well, they can hardly ring, 

because they are neatly encased in mud. And how should 
the rug book people know any better, poor dears? Yet 
why should they voluntarily, and with so little pains at 
verification or proof-reading, throw themselves to the 
lions? One reason is that it is easier for a camel to pass 
through the eye of a needle than for an Anglo-Saxon to 
get it into his head that the h in Bokhara and Daghestan 
means something, and that practically every word in his 
Oriental vocabulary must be accented on the last syllable. 
To do so, at all events, would save him from such horrors 
as Af-ghan'-is-tan, An-go'-ra, or Fer'-a-ghan. Of the last 
I am happy to recognise that Dr. Lewis does not direct us 
to sound the g. And, after all, it is useless to attempt to 
reform the Anglo-Saxon world in the matter of pronounc- 
ing those two gutturals gh and kh. They are disagreeable 

210 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

sounds, and one must use disagreeable terms in describing 
them. The first is the noise you make in your throat 
when you gargle, while the second is the worse noise you 
make when you have a cold and set about clearing your 
throat — if you are ever so impolite as to hawk. But it 
will do you no harm to remember that those sounds are 
perfectly distinct from a simple g or k, and that letters 
exist to express them in the eastern as in some western 
languages. 



All this, of course, has little to do with the serious part of 
rug books, which is the description and classification of 
rugs. And even if we in Ecbatana can't help an occasional 
chuckle, we know it isn't fair to chuckle too loudly about 
people who haven't been as lucky as we. One expert, 
however, authoress of "Rugs in Their Native Land," 
confesses that "a residence of many years in Turkey, 
part of the time in the far interior, offered ample oppor- 
tunity to continue the study of Oriental rugs begun in 
America." And elsewhere she alludes to her familiarity 
with the language of the country (p. 130). I do not like 
to seem rude to a lady; but I could hardly help asking 
myself which of the various languages of the country this 
lady meant when I saw how she spelled names, and when 
I read that khatchlt, alias hatchli and hardjUe, used in 
describing the so-called Princess Bokharas, is theArmenian 
name for cross. The Armenian name for a cross is khach, 
which might better be simplified for Anglo-Saxon readers 
as hach. The Turks, lacking such a word of their own, 
borrow it from the Armenians — to say nothing here of 
the Greeks — and on occasion add their own suffix of origin, 

211 



PERSIAN MINIATURES ^ 

description, or possession, //. Hachli, therefore, is a 
Turkish form, meaning crossed, or having a cross. 

Truth further obliges me to confide in the reader that I 
fail to find any particular evidence of Miss or Mrs. Dunn 
having availed herself of the ample opportunity she men- 
tions. She misses her chance of writing something really 
first-hand and personal about rugs, even in that limited 
part of their native land with which she is acquainted, 
and she repeats many of the stock misnomers which the 
rug books bid fair to make permanent. Thus she classes 
the Mosul — Musul, I am told, is the local pronunciation — 
among Turkish products, and states that more rugs are 
made in and shipped from that district than from any 
other except Smyrna (pp. 86, loo). As a matter of fact, 
comparatively few rugs are made in the neighbourhood 
of Mosul, and practically none are now shipped from 
there — or were before the war. The sole connection that 
a Mosul rug has with Mosul is that a certain class of small 
Kurdish rugs were once collected in that city by Jewish 
dealers, on behalf of their principals in Baghdad. Since 
1900 this trade has passed to the other side of the moun- 
tains, and Hamadan is now the market for "Mosuls." 
They are small, loosely woven, high-piled rugs of the poorer 
qualities, partly from Turkish, oftener from Persian Kur- 
distan, and from the region around Hamadan extending 
even as far south as Malayir. 

There are other things about the obscure subject of 
Kurdistan that a lady who has lived in the far interior of 
Turkey might have told us. But she leaves us to gather 
what is far from the fact — that the inhabitants are all of 
the one Dersim tribe she mentions (p. 102). And she 
lets slip a brilliant opportunity to tell her fellow connois- 

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ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

seurs what none of them except Mr. Mumford seems to 
suspect, that the town they oftenest name "Sehna" is 
purely Kurdish, being — as Sauj Bulagh used to be — the 
capital of Persian Kurdistan, and that "Sehna" rugs are 
Kurdish and not Persian. With regard to her travels in 
remoter regions of "the Orient" our authoress maintains a 
discreet reticence. But we can hardly assume that they 
included Persia when she makes a distinction between 
"Kirmansha" and Kermanshah, and asserts of carpets 
bearing the latter name that they are made in Tabriz. 
I hasten to add, however, that she is by no means alone in 
this astonishing belief. Mr. Mumford was the first to give 
voice to it, and it has been followed more or less faithfully 
by every one of his successors whom I have consulted 
except Mary Beach Langton, in her little book on ''How 
to Know Oriental Rugs'' (p. 78). I might add in passing 
that the serious student will hardly learn from Mrs. 
Langton how to know Oriental rugs, but that she shows 
other evidences of having gone outside the pages of her 
colleagues for her information. The truth is that Ker- 
mans, Kirmans, *' Kirmanshas,'* and "Kermanshahs" are 
all one and the same. They have nothing whatever to do 
with either Kermanshah or Tabriz, except that the modern 
industry in Tabriz was started by weavers from Kerman, 
who imported their own designs and methods of work. 
The Tabrizis, in turn, have influenced the modern output 
of Meshed. As for Kermanshah, which does happen to 
be an important wool and trading centre, it is hardly an 
exaggeration to aifirm that no rugs are or ever were made 
there. What the Satrap told us to the contrary was either 
the exception that proves the rule or a quotation from his 
reminiscences of another province. The name grew out of 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

the ignorance or perverted ingenuity of dealers, who 
knew nothing about so remote a town as Kerman, who were 
confused by its similarity to the name of Kermanshah, and 
whose romantic eyes were attracted by the termination of 
the latter. A " Kermanshah" is merely a better example 
of a modern Kerman. And when the rug is unusually 
big, and the dealer wishes to be unusually impressive, 
he pronounces it, out of the magniloquence of his own 
exuberant heart, a "royal Kermanshah." A precisely 
similar case is that of the so-called royal or princess 
"Bokharas" — which, as it happens, do not come from 
Bokhara. 

Eliza Dunn makes a less pardonable confusion, and one 
that I do not recollect having encountered elsewhere, 
when she speaks of "Meshed or Muskabad" (pp. 103, 
117). Meshed and Muskabad, or Mushkabad, are, in 
Persia, very nearly as far as the East is from the West. 
For Meshed is Meshed, while Mushkabad is Sultanabad 
— of the better classes. Mushkabad was the name of a 
town between Kum and Sultanabad which the long- 
bearded Fat'h Ali Shah destroyed about a hundred years 
ago, and Sultanabad is its modern successor. Eliza Dunn 
might be surprised to hear that most modern Saruks are 
woven in the latter place, as I always am in museums 
to fmd a certain kind of mediaeval pottery labelled Sultan- 
abad. 

I am delighted to give this lady the credit of recognising 
that the so-called Bokhara rugs are really Turkoman. 
But otherwise she does nothing to dispel the haze of 
ignorance that makes possible so preposterous a misnomer 
as "Khiva Bokhara." A Khiva Bokhara means just 
about as much as a Boston New York one, and it is time 

214 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

the rug people had the courage to say so. Our authoress 
runs the gauntlet of a certain proverb about a little 
knowledge when she asserts that the Turkoman "prayer 
rugs are called Tekke from their use in Tekkes or places of 
worship*' (p. 132), apparently oblivious to the fact that 
there are in Transcaspia tribes of Akhal Tekkeh, Merv 
Tekkeh, and heaven only knows how many other kinds of 
Tekkeh Turkomans. In the matter of Beluchistan, again, 
she veers a point nearer the truth than most of her fellow- 
scribes, who outdo each other in moving descriptions of 
the hot and arid homeland of Beluch rugs. I do not pre- 
tend myself to know anything about Beluchistan, or 
whether rugs ^re made in any part of it. I do know, 
however, that most of the Beluch rugs of commerce, if not 
all, come neither from Beluchistan nor, as Eliza Dunn 
states, from Kerman, but from Khorasan. They are 
woven by nomad Beluchis who pitch their black tents in 
the lower part of that province. The two chief markets 
for them are Birjand, the capital of that region and an 
important centre of rug weaving, and Turbat-i-Haidari, 
some ninety miles south of Meshed — not to be confused 
with another Turbat nearer the Afghan border. In the 
Asiatic trade these rugs are rightly called Beluch. The 
other two syllables are added by logical-minded westerners 
jumping at conclusions. 

II 

I have already intimated, and I am ready to repeat in 
so many words, that it is possible to go too far in making 
merry over books which never intended to say the last 
word on an extremely complicated subject. If the reader 
will grant me that it is one of the first impulses of man to 

215 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

laugh at the misnaming of things and places familiar to 
him, I will grant the reader that it is something for an 
inhabitant of New York or Philadelphia to have found out 
where so many of the rugs on his floor came from — and 
that the present critic, for his own part, knows very much 
less about it than the most unreliable of the writers he criti- 
cises. I will also grant that rugs and words are something 
alike in that they are the common property of all man- 
kind, and not, like marbles or canvases or other products 
of the more aristocratic arts, the guarded possession of a 
chosen few. Consequently the bounds between art and 
industry in these two forms of weaving are vaguer than in 
certain other departments of creative activity. And the 
owner of ten or twenty-five or sixty Asiatic rugs needs less 
courage to make a book about them than the possessor of a 
similar number of old Chinese porcelains or Italian paint- 
ings. Moreover, there is not yet, as indeed more than one 
writer of rug books has pointed out, an authoritative 
literature on the subject. The field is still open to whom- 
ever will take it. 

But it will never be taken in any such way as the one 
hitherto followed by American writers. It is no flattering 
proof of what we know of the East and its arts, or of the 
standards of criticism accepted among us, that publishers 
can go on issuing these more or less expensive picture 
books, improvised out of Mr. Mumford and water. 
Whether we regard rugs as works of art or as household 
conveniences, surely they deserve a study no less special- 
ised than etchings, say, or textiles. The simplest hand- 
book of any other art or industry presupposes a back- 
ground of knowledge entirely foreign to these books. The 
fact is that not one of their authors possesses the equip- 

216 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

ment to write a satisfactory rug book. If I include Mr. 
Mumford in this assertion, I must repeat that he deserves 
great credit for his pioneer work in an empty field. His 
followers, however, have done practically nothing to 
clarify and add to the data which he made available to 
them. For they persist in following a method by which 
it is hopeless to arrive at any solid result. 

Their method, one gathers from their books, is to sit 
down with Mr. Mumford in one hand and a school geog- 
raphy in the other, dictating until they feel the need of 
illumination on some obscure point — when they seek 
enlightenment from an Armenian rug pedlar or from the 
buyer of a department store who has been three times to 
Smyrna, Constantinople, Tiflis, and Tabriz. Their con- 
ception of "the Orient," at any rate, seems not to differ 
very materially from the Persian idea of Firengtstan, 
which for the common run of Iranians lumps America 
with Europe and presupposes for us all a common history 
and language. Otherwise how could Mr. Ellwanger, for 
instance, declare that Arabic is the lingua franca of the 
Near East (p. 122), or Dr. Lewis air his views of the Arabic 
alphabet, or their colleagues one and all trot out their 
''namaiUk," "hehbelik/' etc., as applicable to all prayer 
rugs, saddlebags, and so forth? They are not to blame for 
not knowing Arabic and all the other languages and dia- 
lects of Asia. But they are scarcely to be commended 
for volunteering information about matters of which they 
know little or nothing. It naturally makes one distrust 
everything they have to say. And I, for one, am unable 
to comprehend their childlike faith in the gentlemen of 
the trade. 

It is true enough that our knowledge and enjoyment of 

217 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Oriental rugs has been gained chiefly in the way of trade, 
and that dealers were long, perhaps still are, our best 
authorities. But while some dealers are educated men, 
and have enjoyed wide experience in centres both of rug 
selling and rug weaving, they do not appear to be the ones 
to whom the rug book people apply. Is it necessary to 
point out that because a man happens to buy or sell rugs, 
and knows how to distinguish many varieties of them, 
or even to speak one or two of the languages of their 
makers, it does not follow that he is infallible with regard 
to every phase of the subject? For the rest, few Armenian 
rug dealers in America ever set their foot in any centre of 
rug weaving, or ever troubled themselves about little 
matters like geography, orthography, philology, or eth- 
nology. Few of them, either, ever in their lives hesitated 
for an answer, For the Oriental point of view is that 
courtesy requires an answer to a question, the actual 
truth of the reply being quite a secondary matter. Few 
American buyers, furthermore, remain in the countries 
they visit long enough to acquire much first-hand informa- 
tion. And the professional rug buyer is first and foremost 
a business man, not much more likely than his Armenian 
colleague to ask himself or any one else questions about 
the broader aspects of the commerce in which he is en- 
gaged. He is, I like to think, constitutionally more willing 
to utter the simple phrase '' I don't know." But it is as 
easy for him as for any one else to give a particular fact 
a general application, or to think that "Iran** and "Ker- 
manshah" and " Khiva Bokhara'' are good enough names 
for certain recognised kinds of rugs. 

I have perhaps gone too far about to intimate what 
might have been said in a sentence: that the writer of a 

218 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

satisfactory rug book should be a connoisseur doubled 
by an Orientalist. He should possess exact and detailed 
knowledge of rugs, their manufacture, the places they come 
from. He should know something about the languages 
of those places, to say nothing of their geography, their 
history, their customs, and their art. And he should 
have in him enough of a critical method to be capable of 
putting his material into workmanlike form. How else 
can he avoid such pitfalls as I have already pointed out, 
or hope to write a book worthy of ranking with serious 
studies of other arts? For this art, this industry if you 
prefer, is too complex and set in too unfamiliar a back- 
ground to be adequately treated by a foreigner without a 
lifetime of research. 

Consider, for instance, the important detail of classi- 
fication, which justly fills so large a part of every rug book. 
Most of our authors classify carpets on geographical lines, 
enumerating the different countries of Asia where rugs are 
woven and taking some account of the different provinces 
of those countries — especially in Persia. But they also 
cling to trade names, based on however false a geography. 
And besides taking these and other liberties with the map, 
they further confuse the reader by jumping from their 
geographical classification to other systems based on 
similarities of weave or design. Thus most of them make 
a distinction between a Meshed rug and a Khorasan — 
Meshed being, of course, the chief city of that province 
— while maintaining a mysterious silence with regard to 
other weaves of Khorasan. Mr. Mumford, again, invents 
the name Kirmanieh, under which he includes not only 
Kerman but " Khorasan," Meshed, Herat, and Shiraz. 
And Dr. Lewis transfers Kashan to Azerbaijan, further 

219 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

making distinctions between Ardelan and Eastern Kur- 
distan which do not square with the facts. As for the 
great north-central Persian province of Irak Ajemi, 
originally extending from the Elburzrange to Isfahan, it 
now means to the Persians the country around Sultana- 
bad, the Fera'han-Saruk-Serabend country, which may be 
stretched to include Kum and Kashan. This compara- 
tively small area produces more rugs than any other in 
Persia, and it is by no means inaccessible. Yet over it 
reigns in the rug books a twilight of darkest Africa. How, 
then, until the writers of the books know what they are 
talking about, and what perhaps no one in the American 
trade is competent to tell them, can they possibly classify 
with accuracy or perspective? 

The problem, I admit, is far from simple. But it will 
never be solved in a New York library — or even in the 
saloon of an excursion boat on the Great Lakes, where, I 
am informed, one of the most popular of our authors, while 
on a midsummer holiday, composed his magnum opus. 
Dr. Lewis tells us that there are over fifty varieties of 
commercial rugs (p. i6i). If he had said five hundred 
he would have fallen short of the truth. The fact is 
that there are many more kinds of rugs than any one 
seems to suspect. Which partly accounts for such absurd 
trade names as ''Iran" and " Kermanshah.'' Such trade 
names as Mahal, Mushkabad, and Savalan, on the other 
hand, are more legitimate, having been invented by mod- 
ern manufacturers to designate different grades of their 
own Sultanabads. But there are undreamt of subtleties 
even behind the most straightforward name. A Hama- 
dan, for example, is universally described in the books as 
having a camel border, or a camel ground diapered in a 

220 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

Jighter shade, ornamented with what our authors elegantly 
name a pole medallion. Whereas the majority of Hama- 
dans are of quite other types. And until 1912, or there- 
abouts, not one of them came from the town of Hamadan. 
The plain shotori (camel-coloured) Hamadan is made in 
the adjoining district of Mehraban, while the diapered or 
shtreh-shekeri (syrupy!) is from a place called Dargezin. 
Others are from Borchalu, Erzamfud, Famenin, Injelas, 
Kabutraheng, etc. — all as truly Hamadans as the camel 
rugs, because they are woven in the region of Hamadan 
and marketed here, yet each distinctly recognisable to the 
expert by its own local characteristics. And every other 
rug centre has similar local subdivisions, the vast majority 
of which remain unknown to the books. 

A primary essential, then, of a satisfactory rug book is 
that it should include reliable maps. In this respect the 
existing books are woefully deficient. Few of them con- 
tain even approximately accurate plans of any Asiatic 
country, while none of them show the whereabouts of all 
the places they mention. Much less do any of them give 
detailed charts of the principal centres of weaving. This 
is the less excusable because the whole background of this 
art whose masterpieces bear the names of tribes, provinces, 
and cities is geography. Only on geographical lines can 
any clear idea be gained of the different schools of rugs, 
or any foundation be laid for their history and an under- 
standing of their mutual relations. But it is not enough 
to follow a contemporary atlas, however exact — as these 
are at times to teach us. For no contemporary atlas can 
show how boundaries have shifted even in the lifetime of 
existing rugs. This is particularly true of a country like 
Persia, whose interior provinces and exterior frontiers 

221 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

have varied enormously throughout the long period during 
which weavers have sat at looms. And small matters like 
colour and design are often intimately connected with those 
variations. Thus the eastern half of the Transcaucasus 
was Persian far longer than it has been Russian. North- 
ern Armenia and Mosul have frequently been subject to 
Persia. Mesopotamia has oftener than not been a part 
of that empire. As for Khorasan, it is now scarcely a 
quarter of the immense Province of the Sun which for- 
merly ran out to the Oxus and included much of modern 
Afghanistan. Yet writers of rug books apologise for 
relating Herat to Meshed — when it is not a hundred years 
since an imaginary line was drawn between them, and 
scarcely two hundred since the Afghans made their official 
entrance into history. It is extremely important, too, to 
remember that Transoxiana was for centuries as much 
a part of Persia as Ears: is supposed, indeed, to have been 
the birthplace of the Iranian race. 

The geographical background, again, is intimately asso- 
ciated with the historical. The latter has hitherto been 
treated in far too summary a manner, with more informa- 
tion about the Jews and the Egyptians than about the 
people of the colder regions which are the true habitat 
of the rug. As yet we know next to nothing about the 
origins and affiliations of our art. The oldest existing 
samples of rug weaving are fragments of the thirteenth 
or fourteenth centuries, whereas we are well aware that 
the secret of knotting strands of coloured wool on a foun- 
dation of taut strings is of far more antique invention. 
And it would be extremely interesting to find out who 
discovered this secret. The Chinese, perhaps, whose 
civilisation developed so early and so widely? We know, 

222 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

at all events, that long before the Christian era caravans 
were passing to and fro between Mongolia and Khorasan. 
A pretty point waits to be established, too, as to how much 
the Turks took with them into Asia Minor, and how much 
they found there when they arrived. There are resem- 
blances between Turkoman, Caucasian, and Anatolian 
weaves which look like landmarks of an old migration. 
Yet Marco Polo, who passed through Asia Minor toward 
the end of the thirteenth century, found Greeks and 
Armenians weaving ''the finest and handsomest carpets 
in the world.'' 

This is, of course, a subject excessively difficult to 
approach, by reason of a lack of documents. Certain 
documents do exist, however, in the shape of old Persian 
and Arabic geographies or histories. Thus we know that 
as long ago as the tenth century Bokhara, Samarkand, 
and Tashkent were centres of carpet weaving, and that 
this Persian manufacture was at least dabbled in by the 
neighbouring Turks of inner Asia. At the same period 
looms were busy in Birjand, Pars, and even Mesopotamia. 
Under the Mongols of the thirteenth century a school of 
rugs grew up in what is now the province of Mazanderan. 
Marco Polo does not specifically mention the carpets of 
Kerman, but he speaks of "hangings for the use of noble- 
men," while I have noted in Howorth's "History of the 
Mongols'' that Ghazan, the Mongolian Khan of Persia 
to whom Marco Polo brought a princess out of China, 
caused carpets for his palace to be woven at Shiraz. And 
not only did the Venetians who two hundred years later 
visited the court of the Turkoman king Uzun Hasan, at 
Tabriz, have a great deal to say in passing about his beauti- 
ful carpets, but innumerable other European chroniclers 

223 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

• • 

and travellers of the Middle Ages mention that famous 

product of Persia. 

Other documents that wait to be deciphered are the 
historic rugs in public and private collections. These are 
the old masters of the art, which with the exception of the 
Ardebil of South Kensington and a few other celebrated 
carpets remain strangely unknown to most of our experts. 
There are entire books to be made out of the museums. 
And more to the point than quoting Scripture and the 
Odyssey, or describing the enormous jewelled carpet 
which the Arab conquerors found and cut up at Ctesiphon 
in 637, would be a chapter — there is room for a fat mono- 
graph — on the rugs of pictures. The old Dutch and 
Italian painters could furnish between them a priceless 
collection, which should shed no little light on the history 
of our art. Of this Mr. W. A. Hawley, at least ("Oriental 
Rugs, Antique and Modern "), is aware, if he has not found 
time to go so thoroughly into the subject as Bode and 
Lessing. 

A detail of less importance, but one of which a scholarly 
rug book would take cognisance, is one already touched on, 
namely spelling. There is the more excuse, as I said a few 
pages back, for the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in 
which our authors abound, because the Roman alphabet 
was not invented to spell the English language, and be- 
cause the users of that language have not yet fully agreed 
on how to convey its sounds. The case is further com- 
plicated by the fact that other sharers of the Roman 
alphabet have sounds and systems of their own, into 
which the rug book people, as well as geographers and 
writers of travel, occasionally dip. Hence that d in 
" sedjadeh'' and that / in "khatchli/' which are necessary 

224 ^ 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

to the Frenchman but superfluous for us. More super- 
fluous is the unwieldy German dsch which I have occasion- 
ally come across in place of a simple English /. Another 
complication is that Oriental languages contain sounds for 
which we have no exact equivalent. Then the same name 
may be pronounced or written differently by an Arab, a 
Persian, or a Turk, or even by dwellers in different parts 
of the same country. A case in point is the habit of the 
Arabs of using a / where the Persians use a g. Nor, again, 
is it easy to settle on the form of a name. To the people 
of Persian Kurdistan the name of their capital, known to 
us as Sehna or Senna, is Senenduch, while Persians and 
Turks speak of it as Sineh. The ancient city of Gordium, 
equally well known in carpet literature, enjoys a no less 
wonderful variety of titles, of which the Turkish is Gyor- 
dez and the modern Greek Yorthes — with the th hard. 

But even when we agree on a form, we seldom agree how 
to convey the sound of that form to the Anglo-Saxon eye 
and tongue. I think it quite hopeless to attempt to do 
so by means of any phonetic system relying on the more 
purely English combinations, like ee, oo, final te, and all 
the rest. There are too many phonetic systems, and too 
few people understand each others.' Moreover they are 
rarely consistent or complete. Mr. Mumford and his 
family, for instance, usually refer to a well-known Persian 
province as Azerbijan. This spelling takes for granted, 
I suppose, that the reader will pronounce the / as in kite, 
but neglects to consider the fact that the other vowels 
must be uttered in a way which does not come natural to 
Anglo-Saxons. Our only hope is to adopt some system 
like that of the Royal Geographical Society, happily 
coming into vogue among our own editors and map- 

225 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

makers. If you have to learn its conventions in order to 
be able to use it, so do you with any other system — Eng- 
lish being the patchwork language it is. And this system 
has the great merit of being both simple and logical. 

A lesser but by no means negligible detail in which 
the existing rug books fall short is that of illustration. 
And it is the less negligible because so many of them bid 
for favour on the score of their coloured plates. As a 
youthful reader of romance I was always deeply offended 
when a heroine expressly described by the author as blonde 
was portrayed by the illustrator as a brunette, or when 
the death of the villain was depicted a dozen pages be- 
fore or after the event. In the course of years my 
destiny led me into the retreats where these crimes are 
committed, and I have come to understand how they take 
place. But with me, 1 fear, to comprehend is not to 
pardon. As a mature reader of rug books I continue 
to be offended — by pictures that seem to be chosen for 
airy reasons of decoration or availability, that put the 
student to the greatest possible inconvenience in compar- 
ing them with the text, or that fail to do all they can for 
him in the thorny matter of classification. Mr. Hawley 
does more for his reader than any one else, and Dr. Lewis 
IS in this respect more satisfactory than Mr. Mumford — 
though I have reason to suspect that if Mr. Mumford had 
been allowed to make his later editions more than re- 
prints he would have improved them in this as in other 
particulars. But no rug book that I have come across 
illustrates all the stock designs, or inserts the illustrations 
at the right place. A small black-and-white, setting 
forth an essential point at the psychological moment, is 
worth more than the most elaborate coloured plate stuck 

226 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

in where it is most convenient for the folder of the sheets 
and most economical for the publisher of the book. 

Among other matters worth consideration, that of 
the technical processes of rug weaving will bear more 
study than has yet been given them. I am told by those 
who know more about such things than I do that the 
variety of knots and their spacing between strands of 
the foundation is greater than the rug books would 
lead us to believe, and that the last word has not been 
said about the materials used. Although the high, dry 
climate of the Asiatic plateaux is commonly averred to 
be responsible for the sheen and softness of the best 
rugs, none have a greater softness or sheen than the old 
Anatolians, whose wool was produced not far from sea 
level. And it is a fact that perhaps the most perfect 
rugs made in Persia to-day are woven at Kashan out of 
Australian wool, which is fmer and silkier than any 
grown in ''the Orient." 

As for dyes, ancient and modern, the rug book people 
beat their breasts a little more vehemently than they 
need. They mourn the growing rarity of the old vege- 
table dyes, and they do well. They omit to add, however, 
that as garish horrors have been perpetrated with vege- 
table dyes as with mineral. Nor are the former so fast 
as the rug books contend. On the contrary, the beauty 
of vegetable dyes is that they will fade. The point is 
that they fade evenly, one shade toning into another. 
Whereas aniline dyes fade unevenly. The reds have a 
tendency to retain their vigour, while certain other 
colours eventually disappear. A greater fault is that 
they tend to harden the wool, thereby dulling the sheen 
which is the honour of old age. But in Persia and Tur- 

227 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

key, at all events, aniline dyes are employed by no means 
so generally as the rug book people imagine. Not only 
are there in Persia penalties against their importation, 
and against the exportation of rugs in which they are 
used, but it is quite incorrect to say as Dr. Lewis does 
(pp. 78, 218) that two-thirds or three-quarters of mod- 
ern Turkish rugs are aniline dyed. What neither he nor 
any one else mentions is the growing employment of 
alizarin dyes. These also tend to harden the wool, 
though it remains for a later century to determine the 
ultimate effect of this process. But their greatest fault 
is the mythic virtue ascribed to the vegetable dyes: they 
will neither fade nor wash out. Whence is it that those 
who use them incline to soft shades unknown to the old 
weavers, in an attempt to anticipate the tone of age so 
prized by western buyers. 

There is more to be learned than we yet know about 
the colour scale of different weaves, and their schemes of 
colour combination. A point in this connection which 
has never been taken up is that of outline. If you look 
into a Persian rug you will discover that each figure is 
bounded by a line of another colour, sometimes so fme as 
to be almost imperceptible. Yet this inconspicuous 
outline has an extraordinary effect on the field of colour 
it encloses. The same tint will have an entirely dif- 
ferent look, or shade into different directions of the spec- 
trum, according to the colour of its outline. Some 
schools of rugs, like the Bijar, have been found to follow 
invariable rules for outlining. A wider knowledge of such 
laws, therefore, would of course be a help in identification. 

A subject of the utmost complexity, and one which 
awaits a profounder scholarship than has yet dealt with it, 

228 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

is that of design. There is much easy talk in the rug books 
about tribal marks and symbols, about Greece, Egypt, 
further Asia, and Central America, about palms, lotuses, 
and Trees of Life, to say nothing of knots of destiny, 
stars of the Medes, shields of David and Solomon, and 
S's of the Fire Worshippers. It all tends, however, to 
excite rather than to satisfy our curiosity. When Dr. 
Lewis announces (p. 147) that he has devoted more con- 
sideration to this topic than any of his predecessors, he 
forces the critic to add that if one removed from Dr. 
Lewis's chapter on design everything relating to China 
and India there would be little left besides hearsay or 
guesswork. And the value of his claim may be judged 
from the fact that in the rest of his book he omits any men- 
tion whatever of Indian rugs, while to the subject of China 
he devotes a grand total of six pages. 

As our authors study the map and read — perhaps in 
Mr. Mumford, whose treatment of this vast subject, 
however inadequate, is again more worthy than that 
of his followers — of the caravans, the conquests, the mi- 
grations, which have swept back and forth across Asia, 
it no doubt seems highly plausible to them that a motive 
originating in Egypt or India should find lodgment in a 
Persian or Caucasian rug. Nor can any one deny that 
the transfusion of decorative ideas is as old as the swastika. 
How else should Persian miniatures and portraits of 
Lucrezia Crivelli be hanging in an English house in Hama- 
dan? The period of chinoiserie in European ornament is 
one fanciful chapter of this tendency. I myself might 
write another on the unexpected places where I have found 
familiar details of rugs. I have seen on an old Resht 
embroidery, and above a dado of very Chinese-looking 

229 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

tiles in a fifteenth century mosque at Adrianople, as 
in the marble arch of more than one Turkish door, the 
identical pattern of reciprocal trefoils so characteristic 
of Caucasian borders. 1 have also seen Bulgarian towels 
decorated after the fashion of Anatolian rugs, to say 
nothing of Kurdish and Persian ones. Then many of 
the so-called Rhodian plates, as of the Turkish tiles of the 
sixteenth century, bear the bent and serrated lance-leaf 
of the 7nahi (fish) or Herat design. And as for that lozenge 
or spindle which the rug books call a pole medallion, there 
is no end to the repetitions of it I have come across — in 
rugs, in textiles, in embroideries, in the painted panels 
of rooms, on the tiled walls of tombs and palaces in Con- 
stantinople, wrought in iron for the enrichment of an 
Egyptian door, illuminated in miniatures or in manu- 
scripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tooled 
on the covers of innumerable Arabic, Persian, and Turkish 
books, the oldest of which I have noted was bound in 
Baghdad in the eleventh century. And in New York, 
in the twentieth century, an American publisher repro- 
duced it again for the cover of this book — from the back 
of a Persian mirror. 

At the same time, no one who has not been in the East 
can realise the immense conservatism of Oriental peoples, 
their instinctive suspicion of anything foreign, or the 
extreme difficulty they still have in communicating with 
one another. And although some mystic law of associa- 
tion Invariably causes that ample phrase ''the Orient" 
to call up in western minds a picture of the tropics, the 
fact remains that wool rugs are primarily the product of 
cold climates. One should think twice, therefore, before 
adopting the theory that so characteristic a Persian design 

230 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

as the spindle is derived from so exotic a plant as the lotus 
— especially when so competent an authority as Mr. 
Stanley Lane-Poole attributes the medallion as a system 
of ornament to the Sasanians. Neither is it likely that 
a palm could suggest very much to a man who never set 
eyes on one. Even the cypress is too much a friend of 
the sun to be very familiar to the highlanders of western 
Asia. I doubt, moreover, whether it is safe to identify 
the cypress with the Tree of Life, the ''sacred Cocos tree,'' 
and other mythic vegetables. The Mohammedan Tree 
of Life, or the tuba as Mr. Mumford correctly names it in 
a note, is of course an authentic specimen of the botany 
of design. But I question whether the weavers of Kerman 
ever thought about the tuba of the other world when they 
drew their delightful pots of flowers. And 1 am still more 
sceptical of Mr. Hawley's naturalisation in Persia of 
Chinese symbols of connubial happiness. His pair of 
ducks on a famous rug in the Metropolitan Museum 
might perfectly be hens, pigeons, or poppinjays — or a 
heraldic device of the Mamelukes of Egypt. 

As for the so-called pear pattern, that leaf-shaped or 
flame-shaped figure for which the rug books evolve so 
many fanciful origins, I know no more about it than they. 
But I do know that the Persians call it a buteh, meaning 
twig or bush, by which name they further designate the 
camel-thorn of their bare plains. And I have seen the 
same design on old Indian silks, as in photographs of a 
foliated Egyptian damask of the thirteenth or fourteenth 
century, of a Rhages jar of the thirteenth century, and 
of the tiles of the mosque of Sidi Okba in Kairuan, which 
were imported from Baghdad in the ninth century; 
while the Turks used to employ a similar motive in the 

231 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

guise of a cypress with a bent top. Only under the most 
serious reserves, therefore, should one countenance any 
legend of crown jewels, Hindu rivers, and what not. If 
the buteh represents anything at all — on which there is no 
reason to insist — it is probably a conventionalisation of 
some plant form, and far more ancient than the regalia 
of so modern a dynasty as that of the Kajars. In any 
case, these are questions not to be answered by rug pedlars 
or by gentlemen who have been three times to Tiflis. 
Having been there, myself, only twice, and then having 
pursued my investigations no farther than the railway 
station, I say no more ! 

I will say one word more, nevertheless, with regard to 
the future of Oriental rugs. This is a topic on which the 
rug books make most lugubrious prophecies, justly anathe- 
matising the use of aniline dyes and a suspicious tendency 
of this Asiatic craft to take on a European colour. For 
myself, I am less agitated about the aniline peril than 
about the other. But I recognise one or two points which 
the ladies and gentlemen of the rug books apparently 
ignore. The first of those points is one about which I 
have already said a little. Strong as is the instinct of 
Oriental weavers to goon repeating themselves indefinitely, 
there have always been individuals among them who were 
not averse to a novelty. Thus the so-called Isfahan car- 
pets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to 
betray that European influence which was so strong at the 
court of Abbas Shah. The same thing sporadically occurs 
in places so far away from each other as Karabagh and 
Kerman, whose weavers appear to have found an irresisti- 
ble attraction in the European treatment of the rose, so 
different from the usual Persian conventionalisation of 

232 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

that flower. The Mongol and Turkoman kings of Persia 
may have had something to do with the former case, 
since Karabagh was for them a favourite summer resort, 
visited by many a European who brought presents from 
his own land. And freaks of design turn up every now 
and then from the most unexpected source — no doubt the 
whim of some Persian seigneur who happened to take a 
fancy to a European gimcrack. 

One of the most unusual examples I ever saw was a 
rug which hung in our own house, considered by the 
Sah'b to be a Hamadan. This Hamadan, although prop- 
erly knotted, and bearing a name and a date in Arabic 
letters, had the effect of a bit of French tapestry. Yet it 
looked as if it might have been designed after a picture 
by Francesco Guardi. It represented, distinguishably 
enough, St. Mark's basin and San Giorgio Maggiore, with 
gondolas and figures and suggestions of rococo drapery! 
The beauty of it, however, was the lovely Aubusson red 
of the ground, into which amazingly managed to dissolve 
a symphony of delicate blues. Such a piece, of course, is 
an extreme type. But it is a type of a thing which has 
happened in every art and every time. 

Now the reason why this thing is happening in Persia 
to-day, happily on a far less subversive scale, is the very 
reason why so many interesting and successful rug books 
are being written. For the seigneurs who keep busy the 
looms of the East now live chiefly in the West. And that 
is why the simple old colours, which any Persian or Turkish 
child had an inimitable secret of combining, tend to refine 
themselves into the pastel shades of the Smyrna, Hamadan, 
and Sultanabad factories ; why the complicated old designs 
run more and more to open grounds of a single tint ; why 

233 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

we see fewer of those irregularities, both in colour and 
execution, which add charm to many a nomad rug; why 
dealers are driven to so many doubtful expedients for 
bleaching and toning. The truth is that most Americans 
do not like the rugs which most Persians prefer to weave. 
They are afraid of primary colours, and they are more 
afraid of their interior decorator, who tells them that no 
high-minded person puts into his house anything which 
does not match or complement everything else. They 
are afflicted, furthermore, with an incurable mania for 
what they are pleased to call antiques. Is it surprising, 
then, that they get what they want? Yet it is only fair 
to acknowledge what the West has done for this Oriental 
art, at a time when in the Near East taste and patronage 
are at their lowest ebb — in keeping up standards of de- 
sign, colour, material, and craftsmanship. If it were not 
for us, everybody in Persia and Turkey would now be using 
aniline dyes and imitating staring European patterns. 

The true danger lies in quite another quarter. While 
Persia has for centuries exported her carpets, the narrow- 
ing of the modern world has made it easy to exploit this 
commerce on so large a scale that the weavers can no 
longer sit for months and years over such carpets as they 
wove a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. 
As it is, work requiring so much time and labour could 
not possibly be produced in western countries, save in 
excessively small quantities. Our standards of life are so 
different that an American workman of the skill required 
to weave a fme rug would require twenty or thirty times 
the wage with which a Persian is satisfied. It therefore 
pays to make rugs in Persia and export them to Europe 
and America — and will pay so long as the standards of 

234 



ABOUT RUG BOOKS 

life remain in Persia what they are. But what if the 
standardising of the world should continue until the 
Persian no longer remained content with his mud house, 
his empty rooms, his simple pleasures? Then very few 
of us could afford to buy his rugs. 

It may be, however, that the war of mankind will 
check the standardising of the world, will encourage inde- 
pendence and individuality and simple habits. So this 
most fifmly rooted of Oriental habits may for a long time 
yet run no great danger of being changed. To prophesy 
with Dr. Lewis, at any rate, that "the Orient'' is being 
''robbed of its fabrics and the Persian rug will have be- 
come a thing of the past" is pure nonsense. There 
is no more danger of the Persian rug becoming a thing of 
the past than the oil painting. The old masters will 
disappear, yes — save for connoisseurs of the largest 
means. But the secret of the Persian rug is by no means 
lost. It still lives, thank heaven, in millions of Persian 
fingers, to say nothing of Kurdish, Tartar, Turkish, and I 
don't know how many other ones. It lives so energetically 
that we can venture to wait for questions of taste, for 
questions of chemistry, even I hope for questions of 
economics, to settle themselves. And, here and there, 
under leisurely mud roofs, in spite of the craze for ''an- 
tiques," in spite of the jeremiads of the rug books, there 
are being woven carpets quite as good as came from the 
looms of Abbas the Great. Nor do many of them get 
into the hands of buyers for department stores. In a 
hundred years, though, what prices people will pay for 
them — crying out on the degeneracy of their day, and the 
exquisite art of ours! 



235 



XIV 

THE GRAMOPHONE 

/ have not made one complaint against Fortune, since I know she 

acts under compulsion. 
The one thing which from time to time troubles me is my longing 

for Lahore. 

M asud-i-Sad-i-Salman 

A GRAMOPHONE, God wot, is a thing of hor- 
ror. The scrape of its needle would be detest- 
able enough to the ear, without its cheapness 
of imitation. And the seriousness with which 
millions of honest citizens listen to that screeching echo 
of an echo, calling it music, is a thing to stagger one's 
faith in mankind. For absolute music, that creative 
interlinking of sound and silence which the hand of genius 
can charm out of dead wood and metal, is what the 
wretched engine evokes least successfully. 

And yet ! And yet what a thing it is that a living 

voice or an immortal violin can count on even so poor an 
immortality! And as the camera, whose unaided mir- 
acles are in themselves too literal to be engaging, has done 
so much for the study of art and for a dozen different 
kinds of comparative research, so the gramophone, or the 
phonograph, might be an invaluable note-book. I re- 
member a spring day long ago on which I rowed from one 
to another of the gray monasteries which look out from 

236 



THE GRAMOPHONE 

Mt. Athos to the /^gean Sea. To be strictly accurate, I 
myself did not row. A monkish-looking person did that, 
in a rusty black robe and a rusty black felt cap for all the 
world like a Persian kola, telling most unmonastic stories 
as he rowed. I lolled in the stern, enchanted now by 
him and now by a young Greek who sang in the bottom 
of the boat. The latter was a stone-cutter from Salonica 
who had been carving the marble gate of a monastery for 
his uncle the abbot. And having pocketed a pound or 
two for his handiwork, he lay on his back in the sun, 
between the boatman's feet and mine, singing a love-song 
of his people — so long, so quaint, so new to me and wild, 
that I thought I never should forget it. But I did, as I 
have forgotten the strange march I heard in the night at 
Kazvin, and the mad music of the Great Slaughter, and 
many a melancholy air that has made me walk more 
slowly past a tea garden. Whereas if I had only pos- 
sessed one of those horns of mystery into which favourite 
opera singers bellow their favourite airs, I might have 
decorated this page with an outlandish enough array of 
minor notes. 

Having pretended, however, that I would like to see 
myself a collector of folk songs, I must make one or two 
confessions. A symphony, it is true, is the form of art 
which upsets me more than any other — unless it be a 
string quartette. The kind couple who once took me to 
hear Strauss's "Tod und Erklarung'' would have smiled 
to know what a new heaven and a new earth they opened 
for the most youthful of their guests. Nevertheless, I 
cannot deny it: I like an opera! It isn't because I prefer 
a living voice to a violin. For me an Amati rather than 
an Amato, except when it is too dark for any distracting 

237 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

image of a costume or of a self-consciousness or of a thirst 
for applause. The singers, though, are not the opera. 
That is something more complex, interwoven of music, 
colour, and drama. Not that the latter counts for any- 
thing by itself. Otherwise who could keep from snick- 
ering at the absurdity of an overfed tenor bawling " 1 
love you!" at the top of his voice, or ordering a super in 
liquid roulades to shut the door? I may have heard 
" Aida," say, forty times, and to this day I haven't an idea 
what on earth it is about. A mere poetic flash of the 
human is all an opera should suggest, a pretty face, a 
gesture of despair, to warm the intertwining of sound 
and colour. It is a shameless polygamy of arts at best, 
but one — dare I admit it? — which in my time has been 
more potent than black coffee to keep me awake o' 
nights. 

But the worst is that no man has thrown away more 
gramophone needles or used up more records than I ! 
Why, do you suppose, is that? Well, it need not be be- 
cause I like the scratch or the screech. It might be be- 
cause any strong rhythm — a cook beating eggs, a train 
bumping over rail-ends, a Persian pounding a drum — 
makes something in me twitch. It might be because I 
can read both Dostoievsky and Jack London — or John 
Kendrick Bangs, if you prefer. It might be because I 
sometimes fmd quite as much profit in the artistic works 
of Messrs. Goldberg, Maurice Ketten, and Fontaine 
Fox as in the exhibitions of the Academy. In Ham- 
adan it might be because we have precious few ways of 
amusing ourselves. And what did Kipling say about 
rafting a Broadwood up the Nile? Somebody rafted a 
Steinway up the Tigris safely enough for a missionary 

238 



THE GRAMOPHONE 

friend of ours; but the last lap over the mountains from 
Khanikin landed at the unhappy recipient's door nothing 
but a wreck of matchwood and twisted wire. 

A gramophone, however, if less portable than a banjo, 
might have made the poet sing a different song if he had 
been born a decade or two later. For it waits on no 
skilled plucker of strings to provide first aid for the caller, 
time for the dancer, and lightness for the leaden hour. 
Then a pile of records containing Caruso, Harry Lauder, 
and "Nearer my God to thee," is potent with ironic pos- 
sibilities. And are they Memory and Torment? Are 
they Town? Are they all that ever went with evening 
dress? As to that I am no poet, alas, and 1 have a dinner 
jacket in my cupboard. I can only say that that abomin- 
able needle will scratch me away a wall and renew me a 
youth as uncannily as any sudden scent. 

That poor old tottering sawhorse, now, the "Barcarolle" : 
to opera goers and gramophone fiends there is only one 
"Barcarolle"! But why should it always make so much 
more vivid to me than flat-roofed Hamadan and white 
Elvend the gables of Dresden and the half-frozen Elbe? 
Do they still call the Cafe de Paris the Cafe de Paris, I 
wonder — where, in that winter after the resurrection of 
the "Tales of Hoffmann" from the archives of the burned 
Opera House at Vienna, an admirable little orchestra used 
to play the "Barcarolle"? Though it give comfort to the 
enemy I must swear that never have I eaten such cakes 
or drunk such coffee as in the Cafe de Paris in Dresden. 
Perhaps they tasted so because I was then living on let- 
tuce and sour milk at a mad-house a little way up the 
river. Each Tuesday night we used to have a concert in 
that most enlivening of mad-houses, followed by a dance 

239 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

that ended at ten o'clock sharp — or was it nine? Im- 
possible to find out now, even from a Konversaiionsdame, 
There were two Konversaiionsdamen — one blonde, who 
sat at the Korpulententisch, and one brunette, who sat at 
the Magerntisch. Their business was to converse with 
the maniacs and to introduce them one to another. 
There subsisted, of course, a bitter enmity between these 
ladies, so that if you danced with one you would be refused 
by the other. And you should have seen how beauti- 
fully the brunette Konversaiionsdame waltzed with the 
Count from the Korpulententisch, when the orchestra 
played ''Night of stars! O night of love!" As for me, 
I waltzed with the widow from Lodz. Poor dears! I 
wonder what has become of them all now. 

''Mignon'' also has hostile affiliations, of course; but a 
Frenchman wrote the score, and it never fails to take me 
back to that dirty old Teatro Rossini where I first heard 
it. I was very young then, and extremely poor, and 
didn't mind it a bit. So I used to go to the opera as 
often as I could afford ten or twelve cents for the top 
gallery, where the seats were not reserved and where 
if you arrived late you saw nothing. The night I first 
heard "Mignon" I arrived late. I therefore saw noth- 
ing. Nothing, that is, but one glimpse of somebody's 
long white hand, with a rufrle falling over it and a magni- 
ficent stage jewel sparkling on one finger. It was a 
man's hand, too, I fear. But when the gramophone 
scratches out '' Kennst Du das Land," with an extra 
scratch every second because the record is cracked, it 
only sounds more like those Italian fiddles. It even 
smells like that stuffy Italian gallery, full of broad-brimmed 
black hats and fringed black shawls folded cornerwise. 

240 



THE GRAMOPHONE 

Then Caruso: I am of such an antiquity that I hap- 
pened to be on hand during his first American season, 
when he came to, saw, and conquered New York. I don't 
think I went to his first night. But I did go to his last 
one, when he sang *' Lucia'' if I remember correctly, and 
when in almost his final solo his voice cracked worse than 
any record, as I never heard his or anybody else's voice 
crack on the stage. And how we clapped him after it! 
And how in Hamadan we can listen to those thread-bare 
old Italian songs, hearing not them but all manner of 
queer things behind them from which time and distance 
shut us away! 

Of all Italian songs none can be more threadbare 
than the Miserere, from "II Trovatore." Yet the most 
ignoble confession 1 have to make is that I hide in the 
bottom of my heart a guilty love for it, compounded out 
of amusement at the senseless plot of the opera, which I 
have never fathomed and never want to, out of the killing 
way in which the tenor rushes out of prison to kiss his 
hand to the audience when the pack-thread duet is done, 
and out of some theory I used to have about its being more 
typically Italian than anything else; but chiefly out of 
the fact that it was the first opera I ever heard. I heard 
it in English, too, in Boston, and it ravished my innocent 
soul to the seventh heaven. However, there came a day, 
or rather a long succession of nights, when I used to lie 
in bed and hear the Grand Canal lap under my window. 
The sound of it, and of oars dipping between the dark 
palaces, was better than any opera. And so was the disem- 
bodied voice that sang one night, to the strum of a distant 
guitar, with a passion no tenor could pump out of a canvas 
dungeon, "Non ti scordar! Non ti scordar di me!'* 

241 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

No, caro mio; I never shall, to my dying day. And if the 
day after that I find myself in a place half so heavenly as 
Venice on a summer night, and the golden harps sound 
in the least like a guitar on the lagoon, and the angels sing 
anything that begins to be so perfect a pattern of a lyric, 
I shall count myself not so badly off after all. And what 
has all this to do with Persia, or gramophones either? Very 
little, reader; very little. It is odd, though, how unex- 
pectedly a leaden hour may be lightened, and how much 
of the quality of things lies outside themselves. 



242 





"1 


1 




^^^ 


''4m aife^^^ 





XV 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

Whomever thou seest in the saintly garb, 
Suppose him to be a wise man and a saint. 

PERSIAN PROVERB 



IN PERSIA there are, with certain exceptions that 
prove the rule, no family names and no hered- 
itary titles. Every gentleman is a Khan, that 
is, a landowner. Some of them, in truth, own 
very little land. Our cook had pretensions to being 
a Khan; and having divorced his first wife while both of 
them were in their teens, he took to his bosom an elderly 
descendant of the Prophet. His sons will wear green 
turbans and be called Seid. These people form, to be 
sure, a species of nobility. They are so numerous, how- 
ever, and the pedigrees of most of them are so much more 
obscure than in Turkey or Arabia, that their credit is 
chiefly with the common people. 

But no great personage and few small ones are without 
a title of a sort. Such titles carry no distinctions of degree 

243 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

and they are not hereditary. In a few princely houses 
they have a hereditary colour from the fact that the son is 
granted the title worn by his father. These resonant 
titles are glorified nicknames, really, bestowed by the 
Shah in reward for personal merit or services, and they 
thereafter take the place of the bearer's true name. The 
majority of them have in their flowery way a governmental 
flavour — as Sabre of the Dynasty, or Stability of the 
Realm. I have read of a small boy, son of a provincial 
chieftain, who was decorated with a patent as Tiger of the 
Sovereignty. A certain Captain Massakroff of Tehran 
is announced at court as Unique One of the Kingdom. 
A great lady may be Chastity of the State, Full Moon of 
the Dominion, Gaiety of the Dynasty, or simply Solace 
of the Eyes. A palace eunuch signs himself Magnificence 
of the Royal Intimacy! A professional man may earn 
the right to be knovv^n as Illustrious among the Physicians, 
or Sun of the Learned, or Adorner of the Monarchy. 
The last, if you please, is a painter of miniatures. Two 
famous artists of the Timurid period were the Pillar of the 
Painters and the Choicest of the Penmen. The name of 
the poet Bedi-al-Zaman of Hamadan, whose panegyric 
of his native town I quoted at the top of an earlier chapter, 
means Miracle of the Age. A citizen who made an 
address of welcome to the Shah was instantly dubbed 
Tongue of the Presence. And I have heard of a character 
in a comedy who was satirically honoured with the style 
of Uncleanness of Commerce. This is the tradition out 
of which sprang the nicknames Chief of the Desert and 
Prince All Alone, by which the Sah'b and I are known 
below stairs. 

I have the honour to take lessons in Persian from the 

244 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

Sea of Sciences. The Sea of Sciences is not, as you may 
suppose, a man in years. He might be thirty. He might 
be forty. At any rate, the taste of life is still sharp on 
his tongue. Nothing astonishes him more than that I 
do not take his advice and let a skilled barber of his race 
treat my hair, first with red henna and then with blue 
indigo, in order to hide the all too evident ravages im- 
printed upon me by the cares of this world and the deceit- 
fulness of riches; and I notice that he relishes a risque story. 
His dark robe, however, his white turban, and his clipped 
round beard, are marks of the cult. Still, I do not gather 
that he belongs to the hierarchy of the church or the law. 
I take it that he is the natural product of a land in which 
learning has always worn the colours of divinity. His 
true place is among the mirias — and not among those who 
are princes. In fact, the Sea of Sciences strikes me as 
being not quite a gentleman. He prefers to enter the 
house by the kitchen door. I think he likes to get the 
news from the cook — and perhaps a cooky. He has 
very much the air of being engaged in making his fortune. 
He should make a good one, with his quick wit, his sense 
of humour, his varied informiation, and the belief I seem 
to divine in him of the end justifying the means. But I 
must not give the impression that he has no manners. 
He always comes up to my study in his stocking feet, as 
an Oriental should, in order to preserve the house from 
the defilements of the street. Arrived at my door, he 
knocks — which is more than the servants can be counted 
on to do — he bows, he puts his hand to his heart, and he 
enters into the most complicated inquiries about my exact 
state of health. I likewise bow, I make a feint of putting 
an awkward hand on the place where a heart should be, 

245 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

I emit grotesque concatenations of plural nouns and singu- 
lar verbs. The Sea of Sciences then lays off his aba, looks 
doubtfully at Jimmy, pokes the fire, and sets about teach- 
ing me Persian. 

The beauty of this operation is that the Sea of Sciences 
knows not a syllable of English or any other European 
language, while I am acquainted with no word of Persian 
or Arabic. Neither of us, furthermore, owns such a thing 
as a grammar, a reader, or a dictionary. But the Sea of 
Sciences, they say, although he does not like to admit 
descent from a race considered by the Persians to be all 
that is gross and stupid, is of Turkish origin; and I have 
lived in Stambul — or as the Sea of Sciences prefers me to 
say, Islambol. There are many Turks, or Turkish- 
speaking people, in and around Hamadan — more than 
anywhere else in Persia except Azerbaijan. They belong 
to the Turkoman tribe of the Kara-Gozlu, the Black 
Eyed, which has pretensions to equal rank with that of 
the reigning Kajar. It surprised me not a little to fmd 
these people in Ecbatana, though I understood it better 
when I considered that the Turks had to cross Persia 
before they could get into Turkey, and that they must 
have begun doing so a long time ago. So long ago was it, 
however, that Turki, as the Sea of Sciences calls his 
dialect, and Stambuli, as he calls mine, are about as much 
alike as Spanish and Italian. Still, necessity is the mother 
of comprehension. Hence we succeed, partially, painfully, 
and even more darkly than is usual of human intercourse, 
in communicating one with the other. And the result is that 
I pick up a certain amount of TurM, if very little Persian. 

For the learning of letters a book is not necessary, and 
least of all Arabic letters, which are written and printed in 

246 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

the same way. When it came to the point of accustom- 
ing my eye to the look of letters in combination — and 
Arabic letters have a mystifying habit of changing their 
shape according as they fall at the beginning, the middle, 
or the end of a word — our lack of literature was supplied 
by a good missionary. She lent us a Gospel of St. John, 
in Persian. Now I must confess that I am not greatly 
given to searching the Scriptures. Perhaps it is because 
the heart of man is naturally depraved and desperately 
wicked. Perhaps because the feet of my youth were set 
so firmly on the strait and narrow path as to arouse in me 
a perverse latent inclination to stray among byways. At 
all events, the words of Holy Writ were too early familiar 
to me to wear any glamour of the unknown. But I have 
also to confess to a curious psychological reaction that 
took place in me when I began to spell out, haltingly as a 
kindergartener, under the keen black eye of the Sea of 
Sciences, the Persian sentence: "In the beginning was 
the Word . . ." It was, you know, as if I had never 
read that high word before. And I discovered that be- 
cause the Sea of Sciences regarded the Gospel of St. John 
with a good deal of irony, I somehow became, if not its 
impassioned advocate, at least unwilling to take part 
against it. So far did I go to learn that though a man 
may be what is called a free thinker, no man can be free 
of the things that make him think as he does or escape 
the consequences of his birth! I saw myself, after all, a 
product of the tradition that accepts the Gospel of St. 
John. And for the first time in my life I began to look 
with an eye of sympathy upon that Hellenised Hebrew 
dreamer who was capable of writing: "In the beginning 
was the Word ..." 

247 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

The Sea of Sciences entertains quite different ideas as 
to what was in the beginning. He was good enough to 
give me some account of his own ideas, and I found them 
not quite identical with those so poetically put forward in 
the Book of Genesis. It seems that what really was in 
the beginning was water, upon which floated the throne of 
the Creator. He began the work of creation by causing a 
dense vapour to rise from the water and subjecting the 
liquid remainder to a process of drying. This resulted in 
the formation of the seven-fold earth and its seven seas. 
The earth rested on the fm of a fish, the fish and its encir- 
cling element were supported by blocks of stone, those 
reposed on the back of an angel, the angel stood on a rock, 
and the rock was upheld by the wind. 

These operations took place on Sunday and Monday, 
the first and second of April — in so much detail is it known 
to the Sea of Sciences what happened in the beginning. 
On the Tuesday mountains were added to the newly 
created earth, in order to increase its stability. Whence 
is it that earthquakes are rarer than they were in the 
beginning, when the movements of the fish bearing our 
world caused terrible commotions. The work of Wed- 
nesday was the invention of trees, plants, and all vegetable 
life. On the next two days did the Lord perfect his first 
rude sky of vapour, dividing it into seven heavens of 
which the first was green emerald — I quote from the Sea 
of Sciences — the second silver, the third red ruby, the 
fourth pearl, the fifth pure gold, the sixth topaz, the 
seventh and highest a firmament of burning fire, in which 
hover unscorched a myriad of angels singing the praise 
of God. And this firmament is so immense that although 
the angels stand with one foot enough higher than the 

248 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

other for a man to need five hundred years to make the 
journey between them, their heads are yet far below the 
uppermost throne of the Most High. Beneath his throne 
God fixed a sea containing sustenance for all living beings. 
From time to time, the Sea of Sciences assures me, there 
is let down from the seventh heaven to the first such a 
quantity of water as is meted out to man for the irrigation 
of fields. God then gives orders to the winds to carry the 
water to the clouds above the earth, out of which it is 
sifted in the form of rain. 

This work was completed on Friday, April sixth. Fri- 
day is called Juma, or union, because on that day the 
creation of the skies was united to that of the earth: 
whence also do the faithful make that day the one on 
which they unite in mosques for particular prayer. But 
what the Sea of Sciences failed to make quite clear to me 
is how the creation of man fitted into this calendar. It 
seems that before Adam there were jinn, created out of 
the fire of the seventh heaven, who were set upon the 
earth to guard it. They behaved in so unbecoming a 
manner, however, that one of their number, named Iblis, 
begged to be separated from the other jinn. He was 
accordingly named guardian of the first or emerald 
heaven, his former companions being scattered into space 
by the angels of the seventh heaven. And this preemi- 
nence of Iblis was the cause of his downfall, because pride 
had invaded his heart, as the Sea of Sciences pointed out 
to me. God in the meantime imparted to the angels his 
intention of creating another guardian of the earth, who 
should be his vicar there. The angels, hearing that the 
descendants of this new being would in turn cover the 
earth with blood and disorder, like the dispersed jinn, 

249 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

permitted themselves to express surprise that they should 
not rather be chosen, who spent their days in praising 
God and blessing him. Whereupon the Most High re- 
buked them, saying: ''I know what is unknown to you/' 
He then sent the archangel Gabriel to bring him from the 
earth a lump of clay out of which to mould the new being; 
but the earth protested in such alarm that Gabriel re- 
turned to the seventh heaven without fulfilling his mis- 
sion. The same thing happened with the archangel 
Michael, the earth crying out: "I invoke God against 
thee if thou do me hurt.'* So Azrael, in turn, the dark 
angel of death, silenced the earth by replying: *'God pre- 
serve me from ascending again to heaven without carrying 
out his command!'' The clay which Azrael took back 
to heaven was of three kinds, white, red, and black, which 
God wrought with his fmgers and then let lie for forty 
years. This, the Sea of Sciences tells me, is why the races 
of men are of different colours. For two more periods 
of forty years did the Creator allow the clay of the earth 
to lie inanimate, after kneading it with his hands. In 
the meantime he commanded the angels and Iblis to 
bow down before his new creation. The angels at once 
obeyed. As for Iblis, whose heart was filled with pride 
and envy, he refused, even contemptuously kicking the 
clay — he who was formed out of the fire of the seventh 
heaven. Wherefore was he cast out of his emerald heaven 
in disgrace until the Judgment Day. Then the Lord 
began to blow into the clay, which became limp and 
flexible as the breath of God entered every part of it. 
And Adam's first act of life was to sneeze. 

The Sea of Sciences did not attempt to harmonise this 
account with his statement that the creation of Adam was 

250 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

completed on the same day as that of the seven heavens. 
He went on to tell me the story of Eve, much as I had 
heard it before, adding that our first parents were put 
into Paradise on the third hour of that day, and that they 
stayed there no more than three hours. But those three 
hours, he explained to me, were equivalent to 250 years. 
The story of the Serpent was also like that of Genesis. 
When, however, I desired to know if the Serpent and 
Iblis were one, the Sea of Sciences was not quite certain. 
Yet he was able to inform me that the Serpent was ex- 
pelled like Adam and Eve from the Garden, being sent 
to Isfahan, while Eve was removed to Jiddeh and Adam 
to Ceylon. Upon arriving there the latter had in the 
way of garments nothing but the leaves of Paradise. 
These soon dried in the hot sun of Ceylon, and the wind 
dispersed them in dust throughout India. Whence is it 
that that country abounds in aloes, cloves, musk, and 
every kind of spice and aromatic plant. 

How long Adam and Eve were separated, the Sea of 
Sciences did not specify. But they were presently re- 
united at Arafat, the Place of Recognition, near Mecca, 
where great ceremonies are celebrated during the Feast of 
Sacrifice. It was after this meeting that Cain, Abel, 
and Seth were born. What was new to me was to hear 
that Cain and Abel had twin sisters, each of whom be- 
came the wife of the other's twin and so ensured the 
continuation of the race. As for Adam, he died at last 
on another Friday, the sixth of April, when he was 930 
years old. Which is another reason why Mohammedans 
keep that day holy. And the Sea of Sciences assured me 
that these facts had first come down by direct revelation, 
and had then been handed on from generation to genera- 

251 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

tion by men of the most unimpeachable authority, so 
that there could be no manner of doubt about them. 
He did admit, though, that different authorities gave 
different versions of several of the details, adding piously : 
"God better knows the truth." 

I know not whether it is the evident interest I betray 
in these matters, or a desire to implant sound doctrine, 
that leads the Sea of Sciences to tell me many more 
things about his beliefs and customs than you would have 
patience to hear. If a certain book of poetry downstairs 
in the library opened my ears to what he had to say about 
the seven seas, to say nothing of the seven heavens, 
I did not close them when he mentioned seven planets 
and the seven climates of earth subject to the same, each 
having a door by which one may penetrate into life, un- 
locked by mystic polygonal keys of which the first is a 
triangle and the seventh a nonagon. The seven doors 
are science, wealth, power, will, pity, wisdom, and — 
what? Experience? Common sense? I couldn't quite 
make out! I did make out, however, that Hamadan 
lies in the fourth climate. The Sea of Sciences further in- 
formed me that that name is derived according to some 
from the name of a great-grandson of Noah, and accord- 
ing to others from two Arabic words meaning All Knowing. 
For the rest, he flatters Hamadan no more than did old 
Bedi-al-Zaman. He is frank to say that out of our 
hundred thousand inhabitants — foreigners put the figure 
at twenty-five to seventy thousand — no more than forty 
or fifty are true Mohammedans, reading the Koran, shav- 
ing their heads, making their ablutions with due regular- 
ity, and then causing the water to run from the elbow to 
the fingers and not from the fingers to the elbow like those 

252 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

heretical Turks. Of that other arch heretic the Caliph 
Yezid of Damascus, who caused the murder of the Imam 
Hosein, it is enough for the Sea of Sciences to tell me that 
he drank wine and habitually petted dogs. This with a 
glance over the shoulder at Jimmy, snoozing in front of 
the fire, who pricks up that quizzical ear! 

Dim and divided as our councils are, they do not by 
any means run chiefly in channels of propaganda. The 
Sea of Sciences allows me to perceive that much as the 
Koran and the Traditions count for in true education, 
they are not enough. Nothing amuses him more than 
to hear that Omar Khayyam is supposed by the Firengis 
to be a poet of some consequence. Omar Khayyam, he 
assures me, was a mathematician, an astronomer, a 
philosopher, a lesser Avicenna. True, he wrote a few 
quatrains, but not enough of them to be considered a poet. 
Any one can write quatrains. Moreover, many of those 
ascribed to him are really by his master Avicenna, or others. 
And even Omar, he tells me, experimented in other forms. 
Shall I give an example I came across not long afterward 
in the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society," translated 
by H. Beveridge? 

" Yesterday I jested with Reason. 
My heart wanted some explanations. 
I said : ' O fulness of all knowledge, 
I desire to ask you some questions. 
What is this life in the world?' 
He said: 'A sleep, or some dreams.' 
I said: 'What is the result of it?' 
He said: 'Headache, and some griefs.' 
I said to him: 'What is marriage?' He said: 
'Pleasure for an hour and irritation for years.' 

253 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

I said: 'What is the troop of oppressors?' 

He said: 'Wolves, dogs, and some jackals/ 

I said: 'What will tame this sensual soul?' 

He said: 'When it has got some buffets/ 

I said to him: 'What are Khayyam's writings?' 

He said: 'Wrong calculations and some frenzies/'* 

That, at any rate, should prove to a misguided world 
that Fitzgerald had something to do with his poet's fame. 
Why, as the Shah said anent this very matter to Sir 

Mortimer Durand, I myself ! Of the greater poets 

named to me by the Sea of Sciences, he evidently thinks 
most highly of Sadi and Firdeusi. The sayings of the 
former are forever in his mouth, to point all morals and 
to adorn all tales. As for Firdeusi, I learn that he is the 
true and only historian of his country. On the authority 
of the Shah Nameh do I hear that Jamshid, and not the 
great-grandson of Noah, was the actual founder of Hama- 
dan, as of Persepolis and Tus. This Jamshid seems to 
have been the originator of pretty nearly everything else 
in Persia, including plaster, baths, tents, seal rings. New 
Year's Day, and the pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf. 
He reigned seven hundred years and he had two famous 
ministers, one of whom was a Jew and one a Greek. The 
name of the latter, if you please, was Pythagoras. To him 
do the Persians owe the sciences of music and astronomy. 
When I expressed surprise that a Persian king should have 
unbelieving viziers, the Sea of Sciences reminded me with 
a tolerant smile that Jamshid himself was an unbeliever. 
None the less did Jamshid hesitate to authorise the use 
of wine, even in those irreligious days, until one of his 
wives was cured of a fever by a sip of Shiraz. But what 
pleased me as much as anything was a wonderful tur- 

254 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

quoise cup of Jamshid's, found long ago at Persepolis, 
containing a liquor capable of too many magic things for 
me to name. 

I am too ignorant to know how widely read the Sea of 
Sciences may be in the sacred book of the Arabs and in 
the classic poets of his own country. But, as I make it 
out, learning with him stops there. Being myself a 
persistent spoiler of paper I am the quicker to note that if 
I were a Persian, and even so clever a one as Hafiz, I 
might have to wait four or five hundred years before 
the Sea of Sciences would be ready to take cognisance of 
me. If I were not a Persian I fear he would never 
take cognisance of me at all. In that he is quite like a 
fellow-citizen of Sophocles or Pindar. The only Europeans 
he has heard anything about are Alexander the Great, 
Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Shall I add William II? 
The Sea of Sciences seems to be aware of the existence of 
some such personage. But that vague region without 
the pale of the faith means very little to him — beyond the 
fact that certain dwellers in it called Russians, and certain 
others called Englishmen, who seem to be the Kurds and 
the Lurs of Firengistan, are more redoubtable than the 
rest of us. He was stupefied to learn that an ocean wider 
than Persia rolled between my corner of Firengistan and 
the Sah'b's, and that I disclaimed any relationship what- 
soever with the mythical William. Yet the Sea of Sciences 
is not without his curiosities. Several of them concern 
his pupil. I neither teach nor trade, as do most Firengis. 
I spend much of my time in front of a mysterious clicking 
mechanism that periodically rings a bell. Nothing 
pleases the Sea of Sciences more than to hear that bell ring. 
But why do I ring it? Why do I take photographs? 

255 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Why do I separate myself from my family? Why do I 
spend long months in Stambul, and others in Hamadan? 
Why do I ask so many questions? There is evidently 
something queer about a man who leaves his own country 
and wanders in those of other men. 

Nevertheless, I found out, the Sea of Sciences is a trav- 
eller himself. And what ears I pricked up when I heard it ! 
And how sharply I saw again the fantastic picture we 
made of East and West sitting together over a Persian 
Gospel of St. John! But nothing is more impossible than 
to get out of the Sea of Sciences any exact details of his 
voyages. Maps are to him unknown. The points of 
the compass are useful only in finding the direction of 
Mecca. He has been there, it seems, no less than three 
times. Yet he does not wear the coveted title of Hajji; 
for each one of the three pilgrimages has been performed 
at the expense and on the account of another. The Sea 
of Sciences is Meshedi only. Is he very discreet, I wonder, 
or is he like a sailor, that he has so little to tell me about 
his travels? By mere accident do I learn that the waters 
of the Tigris are a powerful anaphrodisiac, cooling the 
unholy desires of men and stopping the neighing of horses. 
Unless used in moderation, however, they cause the skin 
to shrivel up and the drinker to fall into a decline. What 
seems to have made the profoundest impression upon the 
Sea of Sciences are the electric lights of Bombay. For 
like Sindbad the Sailor he has sailed out of Basra, and in 
an English ship like Conrad's Patna has he, with other 
pilgrims of an exacting faith, crossed the Indian Ocean. 
He is ready to admit that the English, as well as the 
Russians, are up to a trick or two beyond the Kurds and 
the Lurs. But his adventures have not kindled in him 

256 



THE SEA OF SCIENCES 

any sympathy toward those enterprising neighbours of 
Persia. 

The Sea of Sciences one day broke to me the news that 
he would have to discontinue our lessons. An old lady 
had died and left in her will a provision that her body was 
to be buried in the holy soil of Kerbela. He, being known 
for an experienced traveller, had been chosen to take it 
there; and having done so he was to perform his fourth 
pilgrimage to Mecca — this time, again, in the name and 
for the credit of the old lady. Before he got ready to 
start, however, the war had broken out. Nothing could 
have delighted him more. He solemnly warned me that 
I would now see what would happen. England and 
Russia would both be destroyed. But the builders of 
the Baghdad railway might have been surprised to hear 
him add the prophecy that a man would come out of the 
East who would raise Persia to her old place as mistress of 
the world. And then all the Christians, he assured me, 
would be forced to turn Mohammedan or to leave the 
country. 

After all, can you blame him? But do you know? I 
would give the eyes of my head to find out whether the 
Sea of Sciences really went to Mecca — or whether he 
perhaps took lessons in German! 



257 



XVI 

WILD BOAR 

Valentin eiaii un saint preire. L'Empereur Claude se le fit 
amener, et lui dit: " Pourquoi done, Valentin, ne t'aequiers-iu 
pas noire amitie en adorant nos dieux et en renonfant a tes vaines 
superstitions ?" 

Teodor de Wyzewa: la legende doree 

/ have heard it stated that ''hunting is a business for the idle'; 
hut those who really understand are aware that hundreds of secrets 
for the government of kingdoms are hidden in this art. 

Colonel P. M. Sykes: the glory of the shia world 



IF THE eye of some honest Nimrod, stranded on a 
desert island or in a snoring country house, with 
nothing better than this book to beguile a bore- 
some hour, should brighten at sight of this chap- 
ter But why should I, for my part, spoil my chapter 

by telling the end at the beginning, or hint what was so 
far from being the case, that we came home with an empty 
bag? 

The head and front of that boar hunt was the Sah'b, who 
had seen a boar hanging up in the Bazaar to seduce the 
eye of some corrupt Christian, who had found out that it 
came from the region of Erzamfud, who made up a party 
for a three-day expedition to that village, who on the 
appointed morning routed two members of the squad out 

258 



WILD BOAR 

of sick-beds, and who engaged a charvadar and his mules 
to carry our kit. It is one thing, however, to engage a 
charvadar and his mules, and it is quite another for a 
charvadar and his mules to turn up at the promised time. 
So it was that the commissariat, under the delighted com- 
mand of Habib, failed to get under way before lunch. 
And it was three o'clock of a short February afternoon 
before the rest of us started on our twenty-five-mile ride. 
Lo, how lightly I say it, reader! I say it with a dis- 
engaged air, as if to make you believe your scribe a cava- 
lier born. But truth compels me to whisper in your 
ear that I never expected to come back alive from that 
boar hunt: not because I expected to fall like Adonis 
under the tusk of a boar, but because I expected to fall 
off my horse and break my neck. For I had never ridden 
twenty-five miles in my life — or not since I was fifteen, 
which is practically the same thing. However, in Persia 
you either ride or you stay at home. There is no other 
way to get about — off the two or three highways in that 
whole huge country which are fit for wheels. So, as I 
would rather have broken my neck than stay at home, 
I rode Bobby. In his salad days Bobby was a man- 
eater. Next to running away, the best thing he did was 
to catch a groom in a corner of a stable yard and squash 
him against a wall. But, like many another hard 
character, Bobby had reformed in his old age, hav- 
ing turned into quite the most exemplary horse in the 
world. . And not only did his sleek sides give evidence of 
what nourishment must be in man, but he was in more 
than one way the most dependable of his companions. 
The Sah'b's horse, for instance, was a more debonair little 
beast, with a strain of Arab in him; but he was quite used 

259 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

up by the time we got to Erzamfud. An even handsomer 
horse was the one ridden by the Beau Brummel of our 
party — a big black brute with a magnificent flying tail 
and a nasty trick of throwing his head up where you could 
least manage him. Another big horse was the gray rid- 
den by the Soldier. He was not a soldier then. He was 
an Irishman, being part of the time an accountant; and 
nothing would have surprised him more than to be told 
that a year from that day he would be hunting not boar 
in Persia but Boches in France. And perhaps you will 
not mind if I am simple enough to add that the Somme will 
always wear for me a different colour because I knew one 
out of the many soldiers who lie upon its banks. Then 
there was — Adonis shall I call him, the youngest of our 
crew, whose horse fell under him so many times that 
afternoon but who came home ungored by any boar? 
And there was also Askar, the groom, an impressive- 
looking person with a purple moustache and with a brass 
plaque, set in front of his black kola, of which he was 
inordinately vain, who divided with Beau Brummel the 
honour of knowing the way. 

As it turned out, neither of them knew it too well. A 
country looks very different under snow from what it 
does at other times, and we veered not a little out of our 
course. Yet I, for one, did not mind. A boar hunt was 
an adventure entirely new to me, and I had been in 
Persia too short a time for the strangeness of it to have 
worn off. We started southward into the easterly foot- 
hills of Elvend, which is a range as well as a single peak. 
The road was first the familiar one, lined by bare poplars 
and willows and well broken out, which runs from Ham- 
adan to the village of Fakhireh — otherwise Boast or 

260 



WILD BOAR 

Glory! After that we found ourselves in a wilder and 
more treeless region, riding up and up long slopes of snow 
to another flat-roofed village, on top of a hill. I think I 
could count on my fmgers the days I spent in Persia 
when no sun was to be seen. This looked as if it were 
going to be one of those days; and every now and then a 
flurry of snow came down out of the windless gray sky. 
There was something about it, in those wide white spaces, 
that for no particular reason reminded me of my first 
sight of the Persian highlands. There were, at any rate, 
views to be looked at from the top of that white hill. 

We dropped down the farther side into another valley 
of bare poplars. The village sprawling among them was 
of a kind I had not seen before, in that the houses were 
built of gray stone. Children were playing on the flat 
roofs, not so far above our heads, and around a big pool 
in the centre of a small square. The trees stood so closely 
around the houses, and the slim lines of them contrasted 
so pleasantly with the heavier and more irregular lines 
of the garden walls, and behind the walls were so many 
of those snow humps which mean a vineyard, that I at 
once made up my mind to go back to that village in the 
spring and rent a gray stone house for a cent a day and 
write the Great American Novel. There were any num- 
ber of streams there, too, gurgling in and out of the ice 
that sheathed their borders with that sound which is so 
different from the gay splash of summer. 

The largest of those streams was quite a river, which 
we followed for a little time. Presently we crossed it 
by a viaduct rather like the knife-edged bridge of Al Sirat, 
over which the faithful pass into Paradise — unless they 
plunge into the Bottomless Pit. It was a single narrow 

261 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

plank, perilously icy, which I never would have dreamed 
of trying to navigate on foot, much less on horseback, if 
I had been alone. As it was I gave Bobby his rein, and 
over my ex-man-eater marched as unconcernedly as if 
that slippery lath had been Brooklyn Bridge. Such is 
it to have had a past, and to have wormed your way out 
of many a tight corner. A real tight corner was a ledge 
to which we next came. From Bobby's back it looked 
about three inches wide, and that strip of glare ice slanted 
from the rocky wall on one side of it toward the small 
precipice on the other. Nevertheless, we all got over 
safely except Adonis, who dashed down the precipice 
with his nag. But the drop, luckily, was not so mortal 
as it sounds; and as Adonis had the quick wit to step 
out of his stirrups as he went down, neither of them got 
anything worse than a jolt. 

We now had to climb a gully that stood up in front of 
us like the side of a house. The deep snow of the trail 
had been so little broken by other travellers that the 
horses had double work. I can't quite say that Bobby 
took it like a bird; but being a Persian horse he had been 
badly brought up to gallop up hill, and being an eater of 
hills as well as of men he got to the top long before his 
companions. There I gave him time to get his breath, 
while he gave me time to admire the magnificent view. 
The most striking thing about it was that the white 
valleys through which we had come were bluer than the 
Mediterranean. Even the plain of Hamadan that 
opened out beyond them was less silver than violet, 
touched here and there by the stray gold of a sun that 
was invisible to us. The dark masses of houses in the 
valleys, the vertical lines of poplars, were all but lost in 

262 



WILD BOAR 

the intensity of blue shadow. Above them, as far as 
we could see — and one can see very far in that clear Per- 
sian air — there was nothing to break the long, flowing 
lines of the snowy landscape. The accent of it all, on 
that gray day of snow, was very different from the warmth 
of the plain of Kazvin as 1 first looked down on it from a 
break of the Elburz mountains; but the elements were 
really the same, and what I shall always remember as 
most characteristic of the look of Persia, made up of pure 
line and colour. Beautiful as trees are, and much as we 
always missed them, the absence of them makes for an 
effect of simplicity, of nobility, not to be found in the 
romantic confusion of a wooded country. 

From that second hill, higher, lonelier, and barer than 
the first, we slid down into a second valley, containing a 
gray stone village of its own, called Simin. The sudden 
descent upon them of five Firengis caused an immense 
commotion in Simin, whose ragged inhabitants crowded 
around to stare at us in the dusk. It was now six o'clock 
and nobody knew just how far we still had to go. Some 
people said one farsakh. Other people said two farsakhs. 
In our hearts we thought it might very well be five 
farsakhs. So we induced one of the inhabitants of 
Simin to guide our guides for the rest of the way. He 
forthwith put on a sleeveless sheepskin jacket, mounted 
a woolly pony, and led us down a villainous river road 
that was continually crosscut by gullies of varying depth. 
The unhappy Adonis came another cropper in one of 
them — on top of his horse, I hasten to add — and as usual 
neither horse nor rider broke a leg, as might well enough 
have happened. 

There wasn't a sign of a trail to us who didn't know it. 

263 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Nevertheless, the man from Simin presently informed us 
that we were not to mind the wolf tracks we saw in the 
snow, as we were seven and well armed. Do you fancy I 
am about to treat you to a tale of the kind that came into 
my head upon the interpretation to me of this interesting 
news, by some admired if anonymous author of my youth, 
describing how skaters on frozen rivers, or drivers in 
Russian forests, would throw back coats, hams, or haply 
the least popular of their own number, to delay the pur- 
suing pack? Alas, our hams, if we had any, were with 
Habib and the charvadar, of whom we had seen no sign 
and who were perhaps already eaten up themselves. 
And having been bred up to tell the truth on all occasions 
save when it will degrade or incriminate me, I am obliged 
to confess that nothing more thrilling happened than a 
sudden outburst of barking from the dogs of an all but 
invisible village. We just made out its cubic shadow on a 
dim hill above us. The man from Simin advised us not 
to go any nearer to it, as village dogs at night are worse 
than wolves. But as he felt the need of a little counsel 
with regard to the route he should follow, he proposed to 
engage another guide, from that same village! To that 
end he began bawling at the top of his voice. Where- 
upon the dogs barked more savagely than ever. Then 
answering shouts faintly replied to the man from Simin, 
out of the dark hill town, where not a light was to be seen. 
After a long interchange of stentorian civilities which I 
bitterly regretted not being able to understand, it tran- 
spired that the shouter in the village had no mind to guide 
the man from Simin at so late and chill an hour. But 
he gave copious instructions as to the whereabouts of 
Erzamfud, to which the man from Simin listened with 

264 



WILD BOAR 

attention. Then he led us into a dark and devious valley 
with the reassuring remark: "It will be a good thing if 
we don't get lost." 

The rest of the way was a kind of arctic dream. It was 
bitterly cold; and as we rode single file after the man from 
Simin, through a country as ghostly and strange as the 
North Pole, we somehow seemed to have exhausted those 
founts of conversation which had been so lively earlier 
in the day. Beau Brummel and Adonis, to be sure, 
having been born on the shores of the Mediterranean, 
gave utterance to their emotions. As for me, I was not 
too numb to note anew that interesting difference between 
the races of the north and of the south, which the former 
are somewhat too quickly given to construe as a difference 
in endurance. As a matter of fact, who can endure more, 
when it comes to the point, than a vineyard tiller of the 
Mediterranean? But he never loses his power of saying 
what he thinks about it, whereas we perhaps embitter 
the sorrows of our hearts by considering it bad form to 
give them voice. What interested me more, however, 
were certain strange flashes that occasionally illuminated 
the gray clouds. The thing looked exactly like the period- 
ical flare of Sandy Hook, before Sandy Hook itself is 
visible, as you come in from the ocean at night. But as 
there could not possibly have been a lighthouse or a 
search light nearer than Baku or Baghdad, and as it 
was not the time of year, with a thermometer somewhere 
around zero, for thunder-storms, I suppose that flash 
must have been from some stray Aurora Borealis — in a 
latitude of Biskra, Charleston, and Los Angeles. 

As we stumbled on we struck into what was evidently 
a better travelled road than the one we had been follow- 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

ing. Patches of trees began, too, to darken the snow, the 
sound of ice-bound water filled the white night, the 
horses instinctively quickened their pace, and at last the 
dogs of Erzamfud barked in front of us. To have as 
little to do with them as possible, we made across a 
field of deep snow for the house of a person known to the 
Sah'b, on the lower edge of the village. How we found 
the slit of an alley below that house I don't know, though 
I do know that we had some trouble in attracting the 
attention of our hosts. However, a shutter presently 
opened above a black arch, a woman looked out, a man 
came down with a lantern, and we discovered that we 
were not too frozen to tumble off our horses. Then we 
followed the lantern into the arch, through a tunnel so 
low that we had to stoop to get through it, into an inner 
court, and up some steep, slippery stairs to a loggia with 
rooms opening out of three sides of it. And we no longer 
considered it good form to keep our sorrows to ourselves 
when we heard that neither Habib nor our provisions had 
yet turned up. Nor can I truthfully report that the most 
poignant part of our sorrow was any fear lest Habib, the 
charvadar, and the mules had been eaten up by the wolves 
who had been good enough to spare the impure Firengi. 

In the middle of the room set apart for our entertain- 
ment stood a big kursi which did not a little to console 
us. I can assure you we lost no time in getting off leg- 
gings and boots as fast as numbed fingers could undo 
them and sticking our legs under the quilt of that blessed 
kursi. And no sooner had the grateful warmth begun 
to thaw us out than Habib arrived with the wherewithal 
for a magnificent dinner. While he was getting it ready 
we had time to look about. Our room was, 1 suppose, 

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WILD BOAR 

the best in the house, for it was of good size and it over- 
looked the sHt of an alley — by a shuttered door that 
hadn't a sign of a rail or a bar to keep an unwarned new- 
comer from stepping off into space. There were two 
other doors, one leading into the loggia and one into 
an inner store-room. Window there was none. There 
were, however, two holes in the roof, whose rafters of 
poplar trunks were black with soot. Above the rafters I 
could make out smaller transverse beams, filled in with 
twigs and camel-thorn; and on top of the camel-thorn, 
of course, lay two or three feet of good thick mud. The 
walls and the floor were also of mud, though there were 
rugs for us to sit on. But besides the kursi and the fire- 
place where Habib squatted at his sauce pans, there was 
not a stick of furniture. Our dinner, when it was ready, 
we ate off the top of the kursi. And good as that dinner 
was, it had the special savour of picnic fare, in that smoky 
mud room of a Persian village, which I would not have 
exchanged for any Ritz restaurant in Christendom. 

By the time we had finished dinner and emptied the 
samovar it was ten o'clock, and we could scarcely keep 
our eyes open. So some of us went to bed under the 
kursi, and others of us rolled up in -our blankets, expecting 
to fall instantly into a stupor which nothing on earth 
could break till it was time to start out on the serious busi- 
ness of our expedition. But we reckoned without our 
host, as the saying goes — or without the cat of our host. 
I suspect the ktcrsi had something to do with it, too. 
At any rate, our dormitory was the family living room, 
out of which the family had turned in our favour; and how- 
ever politely they concealed their feelings with regard 
to our invasion, the family cat was not reconciled to the 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

presence of strangers. Having affairs of her own in the 
inner room, she kept going back and forth all night be- 
tween that room and the loggia. The beauty of this 
operation was that both doors were closed and locked. 
Being Persian doors, however, they were double, though 
not quite so pretty as the painted ones from a palace in 
Isfahan which you may see in the Metropolitan Museum; 
and they fitted so badly that by pressing against the 
bottom of one leaf that wretched cat could wriggle through, 
making an immense clatter as she did so. Every time 
she squeezed in or out somebody woke up and threw a 
boot at random, which generally hit somebody else's 
head. Then poor Beau Brummel, who was one of the 
two to be dragged from their beds of pain upon this 
pleasure party, had a turn and required succour. At 
half-past two, accordingly, we all sat up and had a general 
confab, to say nothing of another round of refreshments. 
And the pleasantest thing about it was to look out of the 
holes in the roof and see a star or two give promise of a 
pleasant day for the boar hunt. 

II 

After that fantastic night I don't know whether we 
would have got up at all if half the village hadn't followed 
the example of the cat and broken in upon us. They 
admired us while we performed a somewhat sketchy toilet 
and consumed the far from sketchy breakfast improvised 
by the accomplished Habib. This was the worse half 
of Erzamfud, of course, and it constituted the force of 
beaters with v/hich we, or all of us but the unhappy Beau 
Brummel, at last set forth, under the most brilliant of 
Persian suns, to track the wild boar to his snowy lair. 

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WILD BOAR 

The hills were full of them, the villagers swore, and they 
warned us against killing more than we should be able to 
carry home. 

Again, reader, do syllables fall trippingly from my 
tongue, against which you are to be warned. 1 set forth 
with the others, it is true. Like them I jibbed at crossing 
a river on a succession of tree trunks coated with ice, to 
the vast amazement of the beaters in preferring to hop 
from boulder to icy boulder of the stream. With them I 
tramped into the mouth of a ravine of unbroken snow, 
whose crust was just thick enough to let you in to your 
knee at the instant the ball of your foot was bent for the 
next step. But I blush to confess that before we had 
gone up that ravine a mile I caved. I caved because I 
had not yet got acclimated to the air of those high places, 
which makes the newcomer's legs lag beneath him, which 
causes him to puflt at the least exertion, which gives him 
cracking headaches when he least wants them, and which 
in Erzamfud, a thousand feet or two above Hamadan, 
brought upon me the faintness that had lost me a shoe 
in the pass of Sultan Bulagh. So, in order not to hold 
the others up, I dropped after all out of the hunt, and 
ploughed shamefacedly back like a faineant through the 
snow to Erzamfud. 

I found Erzamfud, such of it as had not gone boar 
hunting, squatting half naked in the sun, engaged for the 
most part in the more intimate pleasures of The Chase. 
In Hamadan I had grown more or less used to seeing bare 
legs in snow. Here, however, there were no exceptions 
whatever to that simple rule of life, and everybody was 
more or less decollete. But though this is supposed to 
be the coldest part of Persia, it was surprising to find how 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

comforting the sun could be. Under it Erzamfud sat 
very picturesquely in its silver valley, beside its ice-choked 
stream, with poplars pricking up darkly here and there 
against the snow. 

As I mooned about with my camera, still feeling a bit 
shaky and more than a bit conscious of my unworthiness 
as a representative of the huntsmen of Firengistan, I 
ran into Beau Brummel and Askar. They were on their 
way to pay the horses a visit, so I went along, too. We 
found Bobby and his friends stowed away in such a stable 
as they had no doubt put up in many times before. It 
was a sort of cellar without a crack of a window in it, as 
dark and as hot as Ethiopia and as aromatic as I don't 
know what. Certainly much more so than Araby the 
Blest. And I believe Askar had breathed that air all 
night. At any rate. Beau Brummel and I left him there, 
after patting certain warm muzzles and feeling of sundry 
pairs of tired legs. Then, catching sight of a loom through 
an open door on the opposite side of the street, we were 
indiscreet enough to poke our heads through the door. 
Whereupon some ladies who were weaving at the loom 
promptly threw a pair of scissors at us. 

I, who have long been imbued with a sense of the dis- 
tress caused to feminine sensibilities in Mohammedan 
lands by the intrusion of man, interpreted the scissors as 
a hostile demonstration. Beau Brummel, however, more 
adept than I in the dark politics of the sex, and an older 
Persian though a much younger habitue of this curious 
planet, read the omens otherwise. He informed me that 
the ladies of the loom would be highly insulted if we did 
not respond to so complimentary an overture by returning 
the scissors and making them a present or at least pat- 

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WILD BOAR 

ting their cheeks. And he forthwith proceeded to con- 
form to the etiquette of the country after the latter of the 
two methods he had outlined to me. Incidentally he re- 
minded me that it was St. Valentine's day! But I, being 
no Beau Brummel, and having a little change in my 
pocket, concluded that that might be more acceptable 
as a tribute from an elderly intruder. 

Having expressed our appreciation of the handiwork 
of these coquettish weavers by several hawkings, molto 
con espressione as musicians say, of the words khaili khuh, 
which mean "very good," we withdrew — into the arms of 
the master of the house. '' Now we are in for it ! " thought 
I to myself, seeing more vividly than ever the contrast 
between our course of dalliance and that of our hardier 
companions. But what we were in for was a seat under a 
kursi in another part of the house, and several glasses 
of not very inviting looking tea, to say nothing of those 
hard, bright sweets which are an inseparable part of Per- 
sian hospitality. If our host had his own view of the 
episode of the scissors, he kept it to himself. One reason, 
perhaps, was that Beau Brummel in days far gone by 
had ordered of him and had partly paid for three rugs, 
which on completing our host had sold to some one else; 
and he kept asking Beau Brummel in the most affable 
way in the world if Beau Brummel were angry with him. 
He was a middle-aged gentleman with whom blue was 
evidently the favourite colour. He wore a blue turban, 
a blue beard, and blue hands — into both of which he took 
ours upon greeting us and upon bidding us adieu. He 
was a quaint mixture of the fairy story and of the 
sonnet. It filled me with despair that I had no 
tongue to ask him a thousand things I wanted to know: 

271 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

as, for instance, exactly how he dyed the wool for his 
wives' rugs, and whether his hands were always blue or 
whether they and his beard and his turban were sometimes 
yellow or green. 

When at last we succeeded in getting out from under 
Blue Beard's kursi we went back to our own. But we 
found it so much less tolerable than last night, thanks to 
the smudge of tapeh that warmed it, and the windowless 
room was so stuffy and dismal on so sunny a morning, 
that Beau Brummel, out of his greater experience, sug- 
gested a move to the roof. There, accordingly, we car- 
ried rugs, pillows, and books, and there was revealed to me 
an entirely new phase of Persian life. I had seen, of 
course, that most of the roofs in Persia are flat, but I had 
not taken in the fact that people live on them and even 
use them as thoroughfares, passing from house to house 
without the inconvenience of descending into the muddy 
street. The cat who had destroyed our night dozed near 
us in the sun, with one eye open for an indiscreet neigh- 
bour of a watch-dog. The height of her infamy was 
that she wasn't a Persian cat at all, but a plain, short- 
haired tabby who might have been born anywhere. Hens 
picked busily about, and occasionally were shooed squawk- 
ing across the narrow chasm of the street. Ladies who 
were not too particular about concealing their charms 
eyed us in rows; children played tag from roof to roof; a 
few men came to talk to us. One of them was Blue 
Beard. Perhaps he wanted to be sure where we were. 
But when it finally became apparent that no amount of 
shouting could make us understand more than half a 
dozen Persian words, Erzamfud left us to our own devices. 

I remember it as a part of that Persian picture that 

272 



WILD BOAR 

Beau Brummel told me about a windmill belonging to an 
uncle of his, not a windmill like the one at the factory, 
but a stone one with arms sweeping just clear of the 
ground, and how he once spent certain early spring days 
on top of it, looking out on the blue strait between the 
mainland of Asia Minor and the island of Mytilene, build- 
ing fires of driftwood to keep himself warm, and reading 
books I had never associated with a Beau Brummel. 
He told me, too, about that blue strait, in which he had 
often sailed and of which the Greek fishermen say the 
crosswinds and crosscurrents clash so fiercely that they 
strike sparks. So will even the modern Greek poetise 
the phosphorescence of his native seas. And I nearly fell 
off the roof for laughing over a story Beau Brummel told 
me about a duel he had tried to fight with an elderly 
scientist. I need not betray to you the cause of 
that unsuccessful duel. Have duels ever more than one 
cause? Out of the cause of this one Beau Brummel, 
who had yet to see his twenty-fifth birthday, made me 
copy for a three- volume novel. Who knows? I might 
write it some day — in that valley of stone houses and 
poplars and vineyards and running water. At any rate. 
Beau Brummel showed me, on our Persian roof, a gold 
charm with initials on it not his own, and the mystic 
words attendre pour atteindre. And he said what few 
Anglo-Saxons of his years would have said, at least to so 
much of a stranger as I, that there are times when one 
want^ to get away from one's own life, and that he liked 
Persia because of its simplicity. I often thought of that 
afterward. I still think of it, when I hear people rail 
at the ignorance of the East and the peril of its low stan- 
dard of life. After all, is it a low standard of life to be^ 

273 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

content with a little, to be able to endure much, and 
to know that happiness, if it exists, lies not in things? 
However, I thought then how many different kinds of 
people there are in the world, and how good it is, though 
how disgusting to be of a kind subject to fits instead of 
the kind that can start out on a boar hunt seven or eight 
thousand feet above the sea and go through with it. 
Then the intense blue of the sky gradually paled, filmed 
over with an impalpable gray, and at last snow began to 
fall again, powdering us all over as we made up a little 
of the sleep we had lost in the night. 

It was Habib who finally got us off the roof, saying 
that the boar he had expected to roast for lunch was not 
yet arrived and that he had consequently made other 
things ready for us. While we were eating them, not 
thinking how much better they were than we deserved, 
the hunting party came back — more dead than alive. 
When I left them the snow was up to our knees. They 
went on till it was up to their waists; and then, having 
floundered this way and that as the villagers guided them, 
those egregious villagers announced there was too much 
snow this winter for hunting and they would better come 
back in April or November. And it was at least some 
consolation to me for having made a fool of myself twice 
in three months that they had neither shot a boar nor so 
much as seen the track of one, though wolf tracks they 
had crossed in plenty. 

As for the hunters, they were at first past consolation. 

,. But after lunch on top of the kursi, and after changing 

into dry clothes, they revived enough to make up their 

minds that we would all be happier without the kursi. 

)Mine host was vastly surprised at this fresh manifesta- 

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WILD BOAR 

tion of the madness of the Firengi. However, he re- 
moved the quilt and its wooden frame from over the 
fire-hole in the mud floor, carted away every vestige of 
tapeh smouldering therein, and was perfectly willing to 
sell us all the poplar wood we wanted to burn in the fire- 
place. What heat didn't go up the chimney, of course, 
disappeared through the two chinks in the roof and 
through the cracks of those famous doors. Still, we 
all felt better for having the aroma of Persia removed 
from under our noses. 

By this time the indefatigable Sah'b was ready to put 
off his character of Nimrod and put on that of connoisseur 
of rugs. To that end he proposed that the looms of 
Erzamfud be inspected. And we began in our own house, 
in another room of which, downstairs, some women were 
working at a big carpet in front of another kursi. They 
knotted busily away, safely facing their loom, while an old 
lady came and went in a red-and-yellow-figured chader, 
very careful to hold the edges of it between her teeth 
but not at all solicitous about her bare legs. A poor 
wretch of a man hovered in the outskirts of the com- 
pany, his head tied up in a dirty white cloth. They 
told us he had been kicked in the jaw by a horse. A 
baby or two howled in a corner, alarmed by the visitors 
who kept crowding in to stare at the strangers. We 
soon retired in their favour, escorted by the master of 
the house and by a mtr^a of the Sah'b's who had oppor- 
tunely turned up from Simin. 

If you want to know what a Persian village is like, you 
will see something by lying on a roof; but you will see 
more by inspecting looms. There were looms in nearly 
every house of this village — and outrageous looms most 

275 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

of them were, the wooden uprights being made of such 
crooked tree trunks, and the cross-pieces of such crooked 
branches, that we did not wonder at the crookedness of 
some of the rugs. What was more surprising was to 
fmd how much straighter certain of the rugs on such 
looms were than others on the straightest looms of all. 
Once or twice the Sah'b, who had more to say about it 
than you might think, because he had agreed to buy all 
the rugs woven in Erzamfud during a term of years, 
made the weavers rip out 1 don't know how many square 
feet of what they had woven. And in one house he 
pointed out to me the difference between two kinds of 
wool the women were using. The weavers were all women 
and girls, I might add: never a man in this region stoops 
to so soft a craft, as they do in other provinces. Some of 
this wool was much duller and stiffer than the rest, and 
when the Sah'b taxed them with having shorn it from a 
dead sheep, they could not deny him. One reason for 
these shortcomings might be that in Erzamfud they had 
not long been weaving rugs of any such size as many of 
those we saw, having always made what the Persians call 
a do-iar. This, as I have already said, is a two-yard — 
though a ^ar is really thirty-nine inches. A two-yard, 
the Sah'b told me, costs in the Bazaar of Hamadan when 
it is new and not of too good a quality perhaps sixteen 
tomans, of which the wool, the dye, and the thread for 
the foundation would cost not less than twelve. It would 
take a woman about four months to weave, if she kept 
strictly at it, and for her four months' work she would be 
satisfied to get back a pittance more than what she spent 
for the materials, counting her time and her maintenance 
in her own house as things hardly to be paid for. 

276 



WILD BOAR 

Wherever we went we found the weavers working from 
d vagireh, a piece cut out of an old rug, and not from the 
painted patterns they use in the factory at Hamadan. 
This vandalism scandalised me in the highest degree; 
but it taught me, after all, how common rugs are in Persia, 
and how little anybody thinks it necessary to sentimental- 
ise about them. I saw more of them lying on the mud 
floors of hovels that afternoon than hanging on looms. 
To an ignoramus like myself, too, it was quite a lesson in 
design to be told of the figure on one half-fmished rug 
that it went by the name of the lily or of the henna flower, 
and of a prettier pattern of open blossoms in a loose white 
lattice that it was one of the oldest designs in Persia, 
named after one Mina Khan. But who that Mina Khan 
may have been nobody knows — and least of all the gentle- 
men who write rug books, though they confidently name 
him a ruler of western Persia. The specialty of Erzamfud, 
however, is the buteh, that decorative little figure with a 
bent point, so common on the shawls of Kerman, which 
Europeans call the pear pattern, the pine pattern, and a 
thousand other things. Erzamfud is famous, too, for its 
beautiful red dye, which is a sort of Aubusson red on a 
lower key. I was pained to hear that the blue of the dyer 
with the scissors-throwing wives is not quite so successful. 
But I am happy to add that nobody threw any more 
scissors at us. We were now much too formidable a 
party, what with the inspectors, the husbands that went 
with the looms, and odd relatives who happened in to 
inspect the Firengi. What the weavers might better have 
thrown at us, and what in that case would have killed us 
like a shot, were the combs with which they beat down 
their rows of knots. These heavy iron tools, which weavers 

277 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

often represent on their rugs and which westerners explain 
in the most fantastic ways, are much bigger and clumsier 
than the ones used in Hamadan — like most of the other 
appliances we saw, for that matter. 

All this was highly interesting if you happen to be in- 
terested in rugs. If, like me, you are more interested in 
people, there were things to see in the rooms containing 
the looms. They all had mud floors, of course, and rugs 
to sit on. Nobody could afford such a thing as a big car- 
pet. Most of them were also provided with a hursiy and 
were redolent of that penetrating odour of tapeh. Many 
of them had no windows at all. The loom would be set 
up, for the sake of the light, in front of a door so low that 
you had to stoop to get through it. And once inside you 
had to walk softly lest you step on a baby. The true 
place for a baby, of course, is under the kursi; but babies 
have a shifty way of not staying put. When they do, it 
is sometimes because the poor little wretches remain lost 
to sight too long under the quilt, and get smothered in the 
Stench of the tapeh. 

One loom we inspected was in a pitch-dark back room, 
reached through two others. There two women were 
weaving away without seeing a sign of what they were 
doing, or without missing a knot. For our benefit they 
lighted a lamp — and such a lamp! It was a blue earthen- 
ware bowl of oil, with a nick at one end to keep the wick 
in place, set in a handled tray. As the afternoon drew 
on we saw many more lamps of the same kind, some of 
coloured earthenware, some nothing but a tin pot. The 
best of them gave out no more than a spark. So remember 
it the next time your right-angled Ango-Saxon eye is 
offended by some inequality of design or colour in a Per- 

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WILD BOAR 

sian rug. With the matter of colour, however, Blue 
Beard has something to do, as he is not likely to dye all 
the wool needed for one rug in one water. Tethered to 
another loom we found a woolly lamb, no doubt waiting 
to make his contribution to the masterpiece of the house. 
I don't remember whether this house was the one where 
they had taken off the top of the kursi and two women 
were making barley bread over the tapeh fire, kneading 
their dough by beating it against the cobblestones that 
lined the fire-hole. And somewhere else a man sat in a 
pit at the light end of the room where his ladies were 
weaving, manufacturing himself a narrow strip of brown 
homespun for an aba. His apparatus was more like what 
we understand by a loom. By pressing a pedal with his 
foot he worked the alternate threads of his warp back 
and forth, while between them he threw from one hand 
to the other the shuttle carrying the woof. 

Outside the houses looked more substantial than most 
village houses, because a good deal of stone was set in 
their mud. Few of them were more than one storey high, 
and one huddled close to the next as if land were as precious 
as on Manhattan Island. Most of them had interior 
open spaces, however, which were more like barnyards 
than city courts. In one we saw a dovecote, made like 
everything else of clay and full of the prettiest cooing 
inhabitants. Almost every yard, furthermore, contained 
a watch-dog. There wasn't a tuleh or a ta:[i among them. 
They were all plain sags — and all perfectly ready to tear 
us limb from limb. They seemed to be as much at home 
on the roofs as on the ground, snarling down at us from 
the tops of the houses in the most inhospitable manner or 
barking after us for the length of a street and showing 

279 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

every disposition to reach down and nip off somebody's 
ear if they got half a chance. They got none, I am happy 
to report, though in the end they began to be reconciled 
to our presence among their friends. So we went home 
at last, passing through a tilted square with a big pool in 
it. Women and children came and went about the pool 
with earthenware amphorae on their shoulders, quite in 
the most approved classic manner. A less classic mosque 
stood at one side of the square, which we recognised only 
when a small boy mounted to one corner of the roof and 
chanted the call to sunset prayer. Below us we could 
just distinguish the glimmer of the river, winding away 
under the afterglow between its bare poplars. They stood 
out the more darkly because of the pale slope beyond, 
topped by a diamond star. 

Ill 

On our second night in Erzamfud it is not necessary to 
enlarge. It was a replica of the first, minus the kursi. 
Even the cat did not fail us with her devilish performances. 
Yet Habib, it is true, saved us from monotony by the 
heights to which he rose in the way of dinner. And the 
dinner, after all, was followed by a sufficiently historic 
event. For be it known that on St. Valentine's Day, 19 14, 
Erzamfud saw what I confidently believe to have been its 
first game of bridge, played by an Englishman, a French- 
man, an Irishman, and an American — wherein the last, 
according to his wont, was ignominiously routed by the 
forces of the Entente. 

Nor is there much to say of our return the next morning 
to Hamadan. Erzamfud gathered as one man, not to 
say as one dog, to see us off down the long white valley 

280 



WILD BOAR 

of muffled water. The sky was covered again, and so 
much the colour of the tops of the hills that we could 
barely detect where one stopped and the other began. 
From the village trail we presently struck into a well- 
travelled road that led us home by the way we ought to 
have taken before — and alas, I never saw again the name- 
less village of stone houses where I meant to write the 
Great American Novel! But I was perfectly willing not 
to have to pass again the bridge of Al Sirat. Other bridges 
we passed in plenty, several of them brick ones with 
pointed arches, though more often than not we forded the 
half-frozen streams. It gave me a pang to hear that if we 
had only started in the opposite direction we might have 
ended in Isfahan. As it was, the highway gave me a new 
comprehension of the stories I had heard about motoring 
in Persia. There were boulders strewing the middle of it 
and gulches gouged out of it which nothing but a " tank" 
could possibly have coped with. Mere horses could no 
more than follow a trail at one side — until they met a 
caravan. Most of the caravans were mule or donkey 
trains. But several times we encountered long strings of 
camels, rocking down to Isfahan by daylight in this cold 
weather. Bobby pretended to be alarmed by that ex- 
traordinary ophidian air of theirs, having seen a million or 
more of them during his checkered career, and he jumped 
about more skittishly than became his years. 

After passing through one or two big mud villages, in 
one of which some boys were playing on the roofs a game 
of ball I had no time to look into, the country flattened 
out in front of us. Below the farther edge of it we could 
see the plain of Hamadan, uncannily blue under the gray 
sky. You would have thought the horses recognised it 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

as well as we — and very likely they did better. At any 
rate, there was no keeping them together after that. Each 
went his own gait in a thick snow that soon began to fall 
again. Then, if ever, was my best chance to break my 
neck, for we soon took to the fields. And with fields criss- 
crossed by irrigation ditches, and pitted by the yawning 
mouths of holes that end in subterranean streams, cross- 
country riding in the land of the Sun furnishes the ele- 
ments of an exciting sport. It was the more exciting 
now because the flurrying snow made it impossible to see 
where one was going. However, Bobby leaped brooks 
like a grasshopper and by the grace of God he landed me 
in no bottomless pit but at the Khanum's lunch table, 
very hot, not a little out of breath after that long gallop, 
and highly exhilarated by the pleasures of — boar hunting. 
I am sorry, Nimrod, to have told you after all not very 
much about the wild boar of northwestern Iran. But 
what would you? Life is like that. Who ever came home 
with that in his bag which he set out to get? And if you 
choose to spell my title in a different way, I shall not be the 
one to complain. 



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VIGNETTE OF A TIME GONE BY 

You, sir, I entertain you for one of my hundred; only I do not 
like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are Persian 
attire; hut let them he changed. 

William Shakespeare: the tragedy of king lear 

HE WAS born in Italy: I never asked him why. 
He was brought up in France: I never asked 
him why either, having skeletons in my own 
closet. And here he is in Hamadan, unable to 
disguise his fair hair and blue eyes of the north under 
any tall white lamb's wool cap, drilling gendarmes, track- 
ing brigands, and otherwise bearing strange testimony 
to that in man which even before Europe took to living 
in trenches would revolt against delicate days and a 
Christian bed. His Viking fathers might mount a beaked 
galley and steer for England or Normandy or Sicily. 
For him there was nothing to do, and for other young 
Swedish officers who wanted trouble, but to go out to 
Persia. 

They generally found what they wanted. I remember 
one who, spending a night in a supposedly friendly vil- 
lage, fell victim to a feud between one of his own Persian 
lieutenants and his host. I remember another whom, 
as he set about dynamiting the door of a mud castle be- 
tween Shiraz and the Gulf, a Kashgai shot from an upper 

283 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

loophole. And the Major: having served his time un- 
scathed, he gave my lords of the hills one more chance to 
square accounts by organising a farewell drive against 
them before going home to wed. For after all he is a 
human Major, subject to like passions as we. Do I 
not remember a party when we started asking him in- 
discreet questions? It came out, at last, that he had just 
been shooting one of his precious cut-throats. This was 
a gendarme of whom it had been discovered that he was 
betraying information to brigands, letting imprisoned 
ones go, and supplying them with rifles. He then de- 
serted, but was caught and courtmartialled. And it 
fell upon the unhappy Major to cast the deciding vote as 
to what should be done with him. At the word, not all 
the firing-squad pulled their triggers. But enough of them 
did for the Major to come late to dinner, to eat next to 
nothing, to refuse to dance afterward, and to stay longer 
than the other guests, with a funny look in his gay blue 
eyes, saying he was tired of talking Persian all the time. 
Of the house where he lived by himself I knew only 
that there was nothing in it but rugs and a couple of 
orderlies who knew how to boil rice and grease rifles. 
For the rest, the Major was generally out of it, collecting 
copy for successive chapters of the tale of Abbas the High- 
wayman, which ran like a continued story through my 
year in Hamadan. That Abbas, you may remember, 
was the individual who robbed a messenger of the Bank 
of 17,000 tomans. He was a young gentleman of twenty- 
four, reputed to be of most agreeable manners and ap- 
pearance, who owned villages here and there and wives in 
every one. His favourite residence was not unlike that 
of the Old Man of the Mountain, being perched on a crag 

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VIGNETTE OF A TIME GONE BY 

of Sultan Bulagh, surrounded on three sides by precipices. 
To get him out of it was not simple, without losing more 
men than the Major liked to spare. But every now and 
then the Major would pounce on one of his more acces- 
sible villages, turn it inside out to see if Abbas happened 
to be there, and rase every one of its mud houses to the 
ground, after confiscating valuables and making a selection 
of wives and confederates for prison or the firing-squad. 

While the secret service of the Young Man of the 
Mountain was much too good for him to get his neck 
into any such sling, the Major made many a fruitful 
haul on these little raids. On one of them he unearthed 
1,500 of the missing tomans. On another, not having 
read his "Arabian Nights" for nothing, he surprised in an 
AH Baba jar of pretty blue earthenware, apparently full 
of flour, a powdery person who knew something about the 
remaining 15,500. A good many of them, it appeared, 
were to be looked for in the pockets of certain personages 
in Hamadan too lofty for me to name. The resourceful 
Abbas accordingly proposed, through neutral channels, 
that he be made a gendarme himself and be put in charge 
of his favourite section of the Russian road! But he 
failed to keep the midnight tryst which the Major agreed 
upon for the discussion of this ticklish subject, and trans- 
ferred his activities to another part of the country. So, 
quite by accident, did that amusing villain meet his end. 
For, encountering a carriage in which another Swedish 
officer happened to be making a peaceful journey, fol- 
lowed by no more than three gendarmes, the doughty 
Abbas began to shoot. The three gendarmes replied in 
kind and got killed for their pains. As for the Swede, 
he drew a bullet, too. But it did not prevent him from 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

whipping out his revolver in time to lay low the Young 
Man of the Mountain and two of his band. And never, 
never will the Major forgive him for that undeserved piece 
of luck. 

Such, in those quaint old times, were the ways in 
which active young men found outlet for their super- 
fluous energy. Curious to look back on, eh? Yet more 
curious is it to consider that out of such stuff as this 
were concocted half the books we used to read in that 
prehistoric age which ended in August, 19 14. Being my- 
self no romancer, but a sober recorder of fact, I have at- 
tempted to make no copy out of the Major and his Per- 
sian brigand. Can you not see, though, how somebody 
else, putting in a petticoat or two and deflecting one of 
those numerous bullets into the Major's hide or dogging 
him to his wedding day, might have cooked up a pretty 
enough novel of the Zenda school? And can you imagine 
anybody reading it — now? How pale and impossible 
most of them have automatically become, through the 
simple fact that after a long period of mere existence the 
world suddenly began to live! And who but the high 
lords of romance like Kipling and Conrad will be saved 
from the scrap-heap of conventions, subterfuges, and 
timidities piling up around us in these epic days? Even 
Stevenson: how will he come off", I wonder? For adven- 
ture has grown poignant since his time, and there are 
new tests of courage and endurance since that popular 
legend of him was put together which left so strangely 
out of account the very human man behind it. At 
any rate, who can read to-day the stories of sabre and 
spur he fathered? Or those desolating American novels, 
I believe one called them, about the office boy who made 

286 



VIGNETTE OF A TIME GONE BY 

good, and the pure young man who went into politics, 
and the naughty young man who went lassoing steers or 
digging gold? Is it conceivable that those creaking inven- 
tions of string and pasteboard, those hasards of wooden 
swords and back-drop castles, those imitations of imita- 
tions of imitations, not only found breathless readers but 
piled up fortunes for their writers? Done! Finished! 
Exploded ! Or if not, I weep for my race. Any daily paper, 
any number of the Atlantic Monthly, contains stories ten 
times more thrilling — and most of them written, mind 
you, by men who don't know how to write. Did those 
other people? Perhaps it was not their fault, after all, if 
they were born too soon, and had too little to humble them, 
too little to inspire. But what things the next genera- 
tion will have to write about — if only it fmds out how! 



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^^l^^mm 



XVIII 
AVICENNA 

IVar makes a people run through its phases of existence fast. 
It would have taken the Arabs many thousand years to have ad- 
vanced intellectually as Jar as they did in a single century, had 
they, as a nation, remained in profound peace. They did not 
merely shake off that dead weight which clogs the movement of a 
people — its inert mass of common people; they converted that mass 
into a living force. National progress is the sum of individual 
progress; national immobility the result of individual quiescence. 

J. W. Draper: history of the intellectual develop- 
ment OF EUROPE 



IT IS perhaps fitting that among the few '"sights" 
of SO ancient a city as Hamadan, the greater 
number are tombs of famous people who have 
lived there. But it is a sample of the capricious- 
ness of fame that the tomb most frequently pointed out 
to the traveller from afar is that of Queen Esther and her 
cousin Mordecai — who, if they ever existed, owe the 
memory of them that lingers in a forgetful world to one 
unknown pen, and to the accident of a young girl's beauty. 
Whereas Avicenna Well, perhaps genius is an acci- 
dent, too, if a rarer one, and one that demands more of its 
possessor. And beauty is beauty, while philosophy is 

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AVICENNA 

merely philosophy. So it is that Layard, the excavator 
of Nineveh, inquired in vain for the grave that now adds 
most honour to the name of Ecbatana. So it is that 
Prof. Williams Jackson places it in quite a different 
quarter of the town from the one where I was told to 
look for it. And so it is that I, who warn you against 
Jackson's honestly named "rough draft/' cannot say, as 
he apparently can, that I ever set foot in the mausoleum 
of the Prince of Sages. 

This is not because I never saw that low mud dome 
facing a little walled garden on the right bank of the river, 
as you go from Kolapa to the Bazaar. Nor is it because 
I had any reason to doubt its authenticity. It is much 
more certain that a wise man named — not Avicenna, to 
be sure, but something like it, once breathed the thin air 
of Elvend than that the beautiful Jewess Esther ever did; 
and tradition seems always to have marked the place of 
his burial. Another tradition, indeed, has marked his 
house, in a wall of which I am told on very good authority 
that some treatises of his were once uncovered. But 
when they said to me "That is Avicenna's tomb," they 
had no more to say about it. Nor was 1 very much wiser 
when I turned over the odds and ends of books at my 
disposal in Hamadan. Only after I had gone away and 
had turned over other books, in a world unknown to 
Avicenna, did he who once filled the world with the 
rumour of his name begin to become for me anything more 
than a name. So I can no more than make belated 
amends for my ignorance by weaving to his memory 
this ragged wreath. 

Know, then, that this Avicenna was a Pico della Mir- 
andola of the tenth century, named Abu Ali al-Hosein 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Abdallah ibn Sina. Although accounted the last and 
the greatest of the Arab philosophers of the East— a 
century or two after him there were others, you remem- 
ber, in the West — he was really a Persian. He wrote in 
Arabic because it was the learned language of the time, 
just as the Europeans who first translated him wrote in 
Latin. His father was a native of Balkh or Belkh, now 
in Afghanistan but then one of the four chief cities of the 
great province of Khorasan. Ibn Sina himself, however, 
was born in 980 in a village near Bokhara where his father 
is said to have been a tax collector. Bokhara, too, was 
then a part of Persia, and the lad passed the greater part 
of his boyhood in that city. 

In our time, thanks to the invention of printing and the 
ease with which we get about the world, there is an in- 
finity of places where a scholar may lay the foundations 
of his scholarship. At that time, on the contrary, there 
were very few cities containing books and the society of 
those who read or wrote them. But Bokhara, as it hap- 
pened, was one of those cities, and one of the most im- 
portant. Incredible as it seems to us of the self-satisfied 
West, Bokhara was worthy to be compared with Baghdad 
and Constantinople in that age when Berlin and Petro- 
grad did not yet exist, when London, Paris, and Vienna 
were humble frontier towns of which no stranger had 
heard, and when Cordova was not quite at the pitch of 
its preeminence. The day of Baghdad, indeed, had al- 
ready begun to wane. The Caliph Mamun, under whom 
and under whose father Harun al Rashid Baghdad had 
rivalled Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople 
as a focus of intellectual activity, was a hundred and fifty 
years dead. The centre of gravity of the Abbasid caliph- 

290 



AVICENNA 

ate had already shifted to Khorasan, and Bokhara had 
become the seat of one of those local dynasties which 
make Persian history from the ninth to the sixteenth 
centuries a kaleidoscope impossible for any one but the 
fanatic to follow. Suffice it to say that the Samanids 
of Bokhara were descended from another Persian of Balkh, 
whose sons had served Harun al Rashid, whose grandsons 
had established a kingdom of their own under the nominal 
suzerainty of the distant Caliphs, and whose power was 
now threatened by the constantly increasing pressure 
from the East of the Turks. They were great patrons 
of letters, those Samanids, loving to have about them 
not only books but those who wrote books. I have read 
of a poet who lived a little earlier than Ibn Sina, that the 
Emir of Bokhara treated him magnificently enough for 
him never to go out of the house without a train of two 
hundred servants and four hundred camels! Nuh or 
Noah II, the Samanid under whom Ibn Sina was born, 
was one of the last of his line and not quite so munificent 
a friend of poets. Nevertheless, Bokhara was still such a 
place as a boy like Ibn Sina would have chosen to be 
brought up in, if he had had anything to say about it. 

Of his early life the Persians tell the most fanciful 
things — which probably have a substratum of truth. He 
belonged to a race which matures quickly, he lived in 
one of those periods which quicken maturity, and he was 
gifted with unusual powers of mind and memory. And, 
after all, considerable as was the enlightenment of the 
time, the schoolboy of his age had less to learn than the 
schoolboy of ours. So it was that the future philosopher, 
whose family was presumably not in the most exalted cir- 
cumstances, began at the age of five to take lessons in 

291 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

arithmetic from a grocer of Bokhara — no doubt with 
the help of an abacus such as you may see in any Persian 
bazaar or Chinese laundry. At ten he knew all there 
was to know about the Indian calculus, as arithmetic was 
then called, being thoroughly grounded as well in Persian 
and Arabic literature and the Koran. He was also well 
started in algebra and theology. About this time he fell 
into the hands of a wandering physician, apparently a 
Nestorian, who laid the foundation of Ibn Sina's medical 
career, besides teaching him logic, Euclid, the Isagoge of 
Porphyry, and the Almagest — otherwise the astronomy of 
Claudius Ptolemy. Add to this the mysticism which he 
picked up from one Ismail the Sufi, and that tincture of 
Aristotle without which no man could then or for long 
afterward count himself educated, and you will see that 
the young Ibn Sina must have been an infant prodigy of 
the most pernicious sort. At sixteen, if you please, 
he had begun to practise medicine on his own account, evolv- 
ing certain new methods of treatment. But luckily there 
was in him a strong streak of the human. A French biog- 
rapher whom I have consulted says that he was of 
mceurs deplorables, and lets it go at that. I suppose de- 
plorable habits are deplorable habits the world over, and 
it is not necessary to specify! An English biographer 
lets us into a few details, dwelling more on the taste of 
this remarkable young man for strong waters than on his 
penchant for fair persons. The strong waters, it seems, 
he first experimented with by way of keeping awake at his 
work. At any rate, he was not content to investigate 
books. He investigated life with equal enthusiasm. 
And by the time he was seventeen there was very little 
left in his world for him to learn. 

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AVICENNA 

At this early age Ibn Sina made the beginning of his 
immense reputation. Nuh II was not the sick king in 
Bokhara about whom Matthew Arnold has told us, but 
Nuh II fell ill; and no one was able to cure him save 
master Ibn Sina, who was thereupon given the run of the 
king's famous library. And in it he discovered that there 
was, after all, something left for him to learn. He had of 
course read Aristotle long before that. Everybody did 
in those days, except in uncivilised places like London, 
Paris, or Vienna. In fact, he had read Aristotle through, 
in Arabic, forty times — without getting much out of 
him, until in the king's library he found the Aristotelian 
commentaries of another great man named Farabi. This 
Farabi was a Turk of the ninth century who went to 
Baghdad, learned Arabic, found a princely patron who 
took him to Mosul, and before he died in Damascus 
acquired such fame as a philosopher that he became known 
among the Arabs as the Second Master, Aristotle being 
the First and Ibn Sina himself the Third. The discovery 
of this great man was accounted by Ibn Sina as the real 
beginning of his intellectual life, just as the discovery of 
other great men has started other browsers in libraries on 
their careers. And so enchanted was Ibn Sina by his 
discovery that he went at once to a mosque, performed his 
ablutions, gave thanks upon his prayer rug — you may be 
perfectly sure that it was not a ''Bokhara"! — and made 
an alms to the poor. 

Not long after this, when he was eighteen, Ibn Sina 
left Bokhara and returned to his father's village, called 
by some Afshena and by others Harmaitin, where he 
prepared to become a tax collector himself. Whether 
it was at this time that the king's library caught fire I 

293 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

cannot say. Ibn Sina's enemies accused Ibn Sina of 
setting it on fire in order to keep to himself the knowledge 
he had gained from it. But he had barely begun to make 
use of that knowledge, by starting the literary work which 
filled so much of the rest of his life, when both he and his 
enemies found other things to think about. In the first 
place his protector, Nuh II, in spite of the famous cure, 
died, neither Ibn Sina nor any one else having been able 
to save him. Then life in Bokhara began to grow ex- 
tremely uncomfortable by reason of certain rude neigh- 
bours called Turks, who were just beginning to trouble 
that polite Persian country of the Oxus which the Arabs 
had first troubled three hundred years before. And about 
I002 Ibn Sina's father died. That, perhaps not unhappily, 
put an end to tax collecting and threw our young Aris- 
totelian upon his own resources. So, perforce, he became 
a true peripatetic. His first step in the long series of 
wanderings that ended nearly forty years later by the 
river in Hamadan took him to a place called Urganj, 
or in Arabic Urjensh, ancestor of the modern Khiva. 
Here another local prince, Mamun — of Khwarasm? 
Khuarizm? Vambery, who passed there for a native, 
spells it Khahrezm — held a court less lordly than that of 
the Samanids but one at which men of learning and 
letters were equally welcome. And it is proof of the 
peculiar estimation in which such men were held at that 
time in that part of the world that Ibn Sina had not been 
long in Urganj before his new protector received a per- 
emptory demand from another and more potent sovereign 
to the effect that the five most learned members of 
Mamun's court be forthwith despatched to his own court 
at Ghazna, in Afghanistan. 

294 



AVICENNA 

This truculent individual was one of the most notable 
figures of that age. He was the first, they say, to wear 
the title of Sultan, which means power or authority. 
In letters he was less adept than in arms and in the use of 
elephants — to which much of his success in battle was 
attributed by the more polished Persians of the time. 
By race a Turk, named Mahmud and appropriately 
nicknamed the Idol Smasher, he was at that moment 
engaged in smashing more than idols, being intent on 
carving a short-lived empire out of the borders of Persia 
and India. In 1017 he annexed the territories of Kha- 
rezm, to which his demand for the wise men of Prince 
Mamun was a preliminary. Three of the wise men, 
among whom was the historian Al-Biruni, consented to 
make the best of a bad business and go to Ghazna. As 
for Ibn Sina and his fellow-philosopher Masihi, they took 
not kindly to the notion of being driven into the service 
of an Idol Smasher and a Turk. Perhaps they had heard 
about their great contemporary the poet Firdeusi, who 
dedicated to Mahmud of Ghazna his masterpiece the 
Shah Nameh. This historical epic occupies in modern 
Persian literature the place which the Divina Commedia 
does in Italian, being the first serious piece of literature 
composed in the spoken instead of in the learned language 
of Persia under the Caliphs. Firdeusi finished his poem 
about the time Ibn Sina left Bokhara. When he took it 
to Mahmud at Ghazna, the Turkish Idol Smasher paid 
him what might seem to many poets a fair price, namely, 
20,000 dirhems, or some ^2,000. We must remember, 
however, that the writing of this long poem had taken the 
best part of twenty-five years, that in those days one 
edition of a book consisted of one copy, and that poets in 

295 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

general were treated very much more handsomely than 
they are now. At any rate, Firdeusi was so disgusted 
by the Idol Smasher's appreciation of poetry that he 
divided the money between a bath-man and a sherbet- 
seller and ran away to his native town of Tus. There he 
dedicated his book anew to the local potentate, in a hun- 
dred couplets of satire on Sultan Mahmud. The Sipah- 
bud accepted the honour, at the rate of a thousand dir- 
hems a couplet, and discreetly suppressed the dedication. 
And several years later, as the funeral procession of 
Firdeusi was passing out of one gate of Tus, there 
entered by another a caravan from the Idol Smasher, 
bringing the dead poet a belated recompense of 1,500,000 
dirhems. 

But to return to Ibn Sina: he fled from Urganj with his 
associate Masihi, who died in the desert before reaching 
Merv. From there Ibn Sina proceeded to Tus and 
Nishapur, whence he made his way into the low country 
at the southeastern corner of the Caspian then called 
Tabaristan. There he found another patron, in the town 
called by the Persians Gurgan and by the Arabs Jurjan^ 
And there he began the Canon of Medicine on which 
chiefly rested his mediaeval fame. The story goes that 
his success in curing a fellow-traveller at an inn was the 
means of his performing a more profitable cure for the 
nephew of still another petty monarch, one Kabus, 
nephew himself of the discreet Sipahhud who treated 
Firdeusi so handsomely, of that Ziarid house which in 
the tenth and eleventh centuries reigned over Tabaristan 
and Irak Ajemi. It would appear that Ibn Sina was the 
father of Janet and the Freudian family of psycho-analysts, 
if there were not in this case some echo of an earlier one 

296 



AVICENNA 

involving Erosistratus of Alexandria and one of the Se- 
leucids. For by keeping his finger on the pulse of the 
young prince, while talking of this and of that, Ibn Sina 
discovered that the name of a certain young woman pro- 
duced so marked a flutter of the patient's heart that the 
physician was able to diagnose the case and prescribe a 
perfect cure. His fortune, therefore, seemed to be made 
— in spite of the fact that the Idol Smasher had caused 
Ibn Sina's portrait to be sent to the four quarters of the 
East, with the order that whoever discovered the original 
should arrest him and carry him to Ghazna. There is 
no hope, I fear, that after a thousand years any of those 
miniatures will turn up in some one's album! At any 
rate Kabus, himself a poet and a former patron of Al- 
Biruni, paid no attention to his rival's demand. But, 
after a career very nearly as checkered as that of his young 
physician, he died or was assassinated somewhere about 
10 1 2, not long after Ibn Sina had settled down under his 
roof. And the rumoured approach of the terrible Turk 
caused our hero to take the road again, this time in the 
direction of Rei. 

The name of Rei, or Rhages, whose ruins lie not far 
from Tehran, is now most familiar to collectors of Per- 
sian pottery, to say nothing of forgers of the same. 
But in that time it was a great city, known as the birth- 
place of Harun al Rashid, containing one of the most 
famous hospitals of the East. The fame of that hospital 
was largely due to an earlier philosopher-physician, and 
by some accounts a greater, whose name the Europeans 
have twisted into Rhazes. There Ibn Sina found his 
next royal patient and patron in the person of Majd ed 
Deuleh, the local ruler, who was of the Buyids of Irak 

297 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

and Pars. Ibn Sina had stayed long enough in.Rei to 
write some thirty of his treatises, when a quarrel between 
Majd ed Deuleh and his brother Shams ed Deuleh of 
Hamadan, and more particularly the continued encroach- 
ments of his old bete noir the Turk of Ghazna, caused the 
unhappy philosopher to exercise his philosophy and pack 
up anew. So he went on to Kazvin, where he remained 
but a short time. And his next abiding place was the 
one which was destined to be his last — the pleasant town 
of Hamadan. 

Exactly in what year Ibn Sina arrived in the city where 
he now sleeps I have not been able to learn. I take it to 
have been somewhere between 1015 and 1020. He must 
by this time have been in his thirties, or near them, yet 
not too old to interest a patron whom the chronicles all 
too obscurely describe as a highborn lady. The high- 
born lady, however, soon passed him over to the very 
Shams ed Deuleh who had been concerned in his leaving 
Rei, and who at that time was the prince of Hamadan. 
And under the protection of this personage Ibn Sina of 
Bokhara now became Vizier of Ecbatana. We accordingly 
have more copious records of this period of his life than 
if he had been a mere philosopher or man of letters. 
Whether it was that his talents as an administrator were 
not equal to his ability as a writer and a leech, I cannot 
say. But the Kurdish and Turkish soldiers of the Per- 
sian prince presently made what we call in Hamadan a 
shulukh, a row, in the course of which they pillaged the 
house and went so far as to demand the head of the ad= 
venturer from Bokhara. The latter hid for forty days in 
the house of a friendly sheikh until the prince, falling ill, 
caused such minute search to be made for his Vizier- 

298 



AVICENNA 

physician that Ibn Sina was found and brought back to 
court to cure him. 

By that time, I suppose, if any heads disappeared they 
were those of the soldiers. At any rate, Ibn Sina continued 
to be court physician and Vizier, and enjoyed a brief season 
of prosperity which ended with the death of his master in 
1 02 1. During this time he completed the famous Canon 
— though I give the critic leave to differ from me — and he 
conceived if he did not finish the almost equally famous 
Shifa, known in its Latin translation as Sanatio. He also 
wrote many other treatises, none of which prevented him 
from leading a life much livelier than I would ever sus- 
pected possible in staid Hamadan. By day he discharged 
his public duties as Vizier, physician, and arch philosopher 
of the eleventh century. The night he seems to have di- 
vided between his v/riting and his pleasures. These ap- 
pear to have brought him into contact with singers, 
dancers, wine openers, and other persons of a sort we do 
not habitually associate with philosophy. Yet who shall 
say that friends of many kinds, and experiences of all sorts, 
do not conduce to philosophy?. For my own part, while 
I do not go so far as to set up Ibn Sina as a pattern for 
youth, I do not find it in my heart to cry out very bitterly 
against him for finding life quite as interesting as books. 

Precisely what happened when Shams ed Deuleh died 
is not very clear from the accounts I have read. Ibn 
Sina either fell from power or resigned, with the intention 
of giving himself up to his literary work. Perhaps he had 
by this time discovered that it was invariably his lot to 
find a patron whose star was on the wane; and one whose 
star was in the ascendant seemed to be Abu Jafar Mo- 
hammed, otherwise styled as Ala ed Deuleh, chief of the 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Buyids reigning in Isfahan. At all events, he either made 
overtures to this prince or was suspected of doing so by 
the successor of Shams ed Deuleh — from whom he hid in 
the house of an apothecary but who found him and shut 
him up in a fortress somewhere outside of Hamadan. 
Ibn Sina was released, however, when Ala ed Deuleh 
captured Hamadan in 1023 or 1024. And after writing 
another well-known treatise he decamped, with two slaves, 
his brother, and a person somewhat vaguely sketched as 
"a favourite pupil," to Isfahan, in what must have been 
the effective disguise of a Sufi ascetic. 

Ibn Sina was now in middle life, he had written most of 
the works on which his fame rests, his reputation was al- 
ready spread far and wide throughout the extremely in- 
telligent world in which he lived. Isfahan received him 
with all the honours which in that faraway day and in 
that remote country were paid to a talent like his. A 
palace was put at his disposal, he was allowed a handsome 
pension, and he fulfilled for Ala ed Deuleh, on a larger 
scale, the functions he had performed for Shams ed Deuleh. 
He now turned his mind to literature and philology, to 
which he had been criticised for paying too little attention. 
But he did not cease to take interest in the more exhilarat- 
ing things of life; for this most successful period of his 
career was if anything the most disordered. A more curi- 
ous example of the constancy of fate was that his life-long 
enemy, Mahmud of Ghazna, continued to throw the dust 
of perturbation into the cup of his security, as Firdeusi 
said of the same personage, and once very nearly succeeded 
in capturing both Ibn Sina and his master. The Idol 
Smasher did capture and carry off to Ghazna a quantity 
of Ibn Sina's books. And when the terrible Turk died 

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in 1030 his son Masud zealously took up his policy of 
harrying Ibn Sina and with him all western Persia — until 
a quietus was put upon him by those more terrible Turks, 
the Seljuks. 

Ibn Sina, in the meantime, advanced in years; and some 
of my readers will no doubt be happy to hear that he paid 
penalties. His constitution, undermined by his careless 
habit of burning the candle at both ends, was all but shat- 
tered by an attempt which one of his slaves made to poison 
him. Nevertheless, he recovered sufficiently to accompany 
his royal patron back to Hamadan. But there, in the 
y^r 1037, he suffered a relapse into a mortal illness. It 
is another trait of the human in him that he made a death- 
bed repentance of his sins. He freed his slaves, he re- 
stored — give ear, O followers of /Esculapius! — moneys 
which might have been considered dishonestly gained, he 
distributed his goods among the poor, and he caused the 
Koran to be read continuously aloud to him, hearing the 
whole of it every three days. So he breathed his last in 
the pleasant month of June, and was buried by that ca- 
pricious river whose waters flow from the snows of Elvend. 

Ibn Sina died just in time to escape the onrush of the 
Seljuks, who overran Persia and Asia Minor in the middle 
of the eleventh century. But it is one of the ironies of 
life that the tomb which now covers his grave was built 
by a member of that Turkish race from which he spent 
the better part of his days in attempting to flee. This 
was another high-born lady, the princess Nigar Khanum, 
of the Turkoman house of the Kajars, and she reared or 
restored that humble dome in the year of grace 1877. 
Under it lies, too, I learned from Prof. Williams Jack- 
son, a mystic poet by the name of Abu Said. Professor 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Jackson says no more about him, however, nor was the 
Sea of Sciences able to tell me anything very definite. 
What was my pleasure then, upon reaching faraway New 
York, which is now a greater magazine of books than 
was ever Bokhara or Alexandria, to learn from Prof. 
E. G. Browne that a certain Abu Said ibn Abul Khair, 
the father of Sufi verse, was a contemporary and friend of 
Ibn Sina. Professor Browne quotes a quaint story to 
the effect that after the first meeting of these two great 
men Ibn Sina said: "What I know, he sees," while Abu 
Said's remark was: ''What I see, he knows/' Browne 
also translates a couple of quatrains exchanged by the 
famous pair. The first, which was Ibn Sina's, runs as 
follows : 

" ' Tis we who on God's grace do most rely, 
Who put our vices and our virtues by. 
For where thy grace exists, the undone done 
Is reckoned, and the done undone thereby." 

To which the Sufi made response: 

"O steeped in sin and void of good, dost try 
To save thyself, and thy misdeeds deny? 
Can sins be cancelled, or neglect made good? 
Vainly on grace divine dost thou rely!" 

Professor Browne says that Abu Said was born in 
Khorasan in 968 and that he died in 1049 — he does not 
say where. Let us have it then, till better proof be forth- 
coming, that those two forgotten great men of a forgotten 
great age are really the ones who lie together under the 
humble dome which the Turkoman princess raised on the 
river bank of Hamadan. 

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II 



This is a story, after all, not too vivid or complete. 
What we do not know about the Pico della Mirandola of 
Persia, with his so humanly contradictory traits, piques 
our curiosity more than what we do know. Yet it is a 
fact that the occupant of that obscure mausoleum, who 
wrote in one of the least known and most difficult of living 
tongues and who never went out of Persia, left a name as 
the Prince of Sages that for six hundred years after his 
death filled the world with its rumour. Amid all the varied 
distractions of his life he found time to write over a hun- 
dred books — some very short, it is true, but others very 
long. They covered almost every branch of science as it 
was then known : logic, metaphysics, theology, psychology, 
philosophy, mysticism, medicine, chemistry, alchemy, 
botany, zoology, mathematics, music. The greater num- 
ber of his works are lost, but among them we know that 
there was an encyclopedia of human knowledge in twenty 
volumes. Another was entitled "On the Utility and 
Advantage of Science,'' and a third "On Astronomical 
Observations.'* He correctly described the formation of 
mountains and the process of petrifaction. He found leis- 
ure to catalogue the medicinal plants that grow on the 
slopes of Elvend. He was familiar with the surgical pro- 
cedure known as the intubation of the larynx. The fruit 
of some of his philological studies is embodied in his treatise 
"On the Arabic Language and Its Properties." He was 
withal a poet, composing several of his shorter works in 
rhyme. Among his imaginative writings is an allegory 
called " Hai ibn Yakzan." And to him are ascribed on no 
less than three contemporary authorities many of the 

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quatrains of his follower Omar Khayyam. One of them is 
very familiar to us in Fitzgerald's translation: 

" Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate 
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, 
And many a knot unravelled by the road: 
But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate." 

Fitzgerald also translated J ami's narrative poem of 
''Salaman and Absal," the story of which was first written 
by Ibn Sina. 

If I really were to do my duty by you, reader of mine, 
and by this time either my friend or my enemy, I should 
now proceed to expound to you in detail the philosophical 
system of him whom you know as Avicenna, pointing out 
to you exactly what he took from Hippocrates through 
Galen, modified by Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists, 
what from the Sufis whose tenets his friend Abu Said 
first crystallised into verse, and what he added out of his 
own curious desire, so characteristic of the thought of his 
time and so like what Pico della Mirandola attempted four 
hundred years later, to harmonise not only Plato with 
Aristotle but the general body of Greek philosophy as it 
came to him through the garbled translations of Baghdad 
with the dogmas of Islam. Incidentally, I should warn 
you against a certain pseudo-Aristotelian Theology which 
the Arabs accepted as genuine but which was really a 
collection of the Enneads of Plotinus, of the third or fourth 
century. I should then explain the Oriental theory of 
Emanation, dwelling on Ibn Sina's favourite idea that the 
body is the tool of the soul. To this exposition I should 
add an abstract of the Canon and the Sanatio, which were 
the basis of mediaeval medicine. Nor should I fail to 

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analyse Ibn Sina's division of learning into the speculative 
and practical sciences, followed in all the European uni- 
versities until the seventeenth century, or to state that 
his aim was not to teach truth but to preserve from error. 
And having done so it would behoove me to assign him his 
true place in the hierarchy of philosophy, as well as to 
estimate the literary qualities of this author of over a 
hundred books. 

If you are that kind of a reader, however, you will not 
read this kind of a book. And I shall not be so foolish as 
to attempt to disguise from you the fact that I have never 
read Avicenna or his master Aristotle, and never shall. 
There was a time, indeed, when such literature had for me 
a fantastic interest. That was the time when I began to 
discover that religion, after all, does not explain all one 
would like to know about this cruel and comforting world 
— neither my religion nor the other religions of which I 
vaguely took cognisance. And I was young enough to 
imagine that the philosophers had been more successful 
than the priests in unravelling "the master-knot of human 
fate." But by the time I found out that all they could 
do was to formulate rather more clearly and elaborately 
than myself what we can know and what we cannot know, 
I began to recognise that the tendency of my own mind — ■ 
if I may so dignify that chaos of instincts and impulses — 
ran to the concrete rather than to the abstract, and that 
there was quite enough in the appearances of life to 
keep one honest and busy without waiting to solve the 
origin or the end of life. 

This is no doubt a debasing confession to make; but 
what can I do? 1 am made like that. And nothing in- 
terests or imposes me less than a formal system of any 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

kind. For I cannot make myself believe that the system 
ever has been or ever will be devised which will not sooner 
or later be upset. What does interest me is the human 
and personal in it all, the eternal struggle of men to under- 
stand, to learn, to perfect. As a man, therefore, as a 
friend of princes, mystics, and dancers, as a personality 
so vital and so curious of life that he filled his life to the 
brim with toil and play, and made for himself one of the 
greatest names in a time not one of the least, Avicenna 
interests me extraordinarily. They say, indeed, that he 
does not deserve his immense reputation: that as an 
Aristotelian he is inferior to his predecessor Farabi and 
to his successor Averroes; that in medicine he was sur- 
passed by Rhazes of Rei. And who knows? It is often 
an accident that lifts one man into fame above another — 
an accident of birth, of time, of place, of style, of method, 
of something so little a part of him as the friends he hap- 
pened to make. Yet however Avicenna acquired so im- 
mense a fame, the fact remains that he acquired it. And 
that humble tomb of his in Hamadan is a monument to 
one of the strangest incidents in the history of human 
thought, whereby a Persian of Bokhara absorbed so much 
of the learning of Greece that he was able to pass it on to 
Europe at the moment when Europe began to stir out of 
the ignorance and degradation into which our ancestors 
had sunk. 

One of the strongest incentives to the reading of history 
is that curious rhythm of history which sets one race up 
and pulls another down, the repeated shifting of the centre 
of gravity of civilisation. A case in point is that of the 
city of Bokhara, now a ruinous provincial town of Turks, 
or men of Turkish origin, to attempt to visit which is an 

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adventure comparable to exploring the forests of Africa. 
Yet Bokhara was a notable centre of learning when London 
and Paris were unknown villages, and in it Avicenna was 
able to study Greek philosophy when Greece itself was 
lost in darkness. These are times when we see more 
vividly than in times of peace how such things may come 
about. We who are of European origin, however, are so 
accustomed to saying ''We are the people, and wisdom 
shall die with us," we find it so hard to take seriously the 
civilisations of the East, and so many barriers of time, 
space, race, language, and religion shut us off from the 
period in which our own civilisation was in the making, 
that the case of Avicenna seems all the more extraordinary. 
And we incline too much to forget how it was that the 
Hellenism which was the foundation alike of modern 
culture and of kuUur was driven into the East, how the 
Arabs had a part in saving it from destruction, and how 
through Spain they communicated it to the barbarous 
countries of the West. 

Athens, of course, was the first capital of civilisation in 
Europe, the great missionary to the dark continent behind 
it. How many centuries it cost the Greeks to store up 
their treasure of Hellenism we may never know; but we 
do know that the work of those who handed it down to 
us was done in the short two hundred years between the 
Persian Wars and the wars of Alexander the Great. 
With the single exception of Homer, who is supposed to 
have lived anywhere from i,ioo to 800 B.C., the philoso- 
phers, the dramatists, the poets, and the sculptors of the 
Golden Age flourished between the sixth and the fourth 
centuries. The capital of the Hellenic world then shifted 
to the continent from which Greece derived its earliest 

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inspiration, and under the Ptolemies Alexandria became 
the centre of learning and art in the West. Thither were 
transported from the archives of Athens the originals of 
the great dramatists, together with all the other manu- 
scripts that could be collected. So zealous indeed were 
the Alexandrians in the accumulation of books that no 
visitor was allowed to go away from the city without leav- 
ing a copy of any manuscript which he might possess; 
and when Attains of Pergamum set about assembling a 
library of his own in 241 B.C., Ptolemy Epiphanes forth- 
with prohibited the export of Egyptian papyrus, upon 
which all the books of the time were written. This did 
not prevent the Pergamenes from inventing that substi- 
tute for papyrus whose name of parchment is derived 
from their own. But their library of 200,000 volumes was 
destined to enrich the Alexandrians after all, thanks to 
Julius Caesar, who presented it to the latter in partial 
reparation for the burning by his legionaries of the 
Brouchion and its books. Papyri, however, were not all 
that Alexandria could boast. The school of the Neo- 
Platonists carried on the tradition of the Greek philoso- 
phers, while the Museum of Ptolemy Philadelphus became 
a pioneer centre of scientific research. There the dis- 
section of the human body was first practised, and there 
did western astronomers first measure a meridian of the 
earth. Nor did the hostility of the seventh Ptolemy to- 
ward men of learning suifice to destroy the leadership of 
Alexandria among the Greek cities. 

With the rise of Rome into an imperial power, toward 
the beginning of our era, a capital of a new kind grew up 
in the Mediterranean. Alexandria and Athens continued 
to be frequented by scholars and lovers of the arts. But 

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the political hegemony of Rome naturally attracted so 
much wealth and wit that the Italian city might have 
become the intellectual capital of the empire in a pro- 
founder sense than it did, had it not been for certain un- 
foreseen circumstances. These were the spread of Chris- 
tianity, the inroads of the barbarians, and the transfer 
of the seat of government to the East. Constantinople 
accordingly became in turn the true capital of Greco- 
Roman civilisation. And Constantinople enjoyed a far 
longer period of preeminence, thus not only preserving on 
Greek ground a remnant of the precious heritage of Athens 
but developing potent arts of its own. 

At the same time there is no denying that between the 
old order and the new antagonisms arose which were little 
less formidable than the Goths and the Huns. Two ele- 
ments in early Christianity were particularly fatal to the 
achievements of the older time. One of these, indeed, 
lay in the Greek spirit itself, namely, that intellectual 
quickness, that desire of definition, which out of a simple 
and humane creed brought forth an infinity of warring 
sects and ended in an irreconcilable breach between the 
churches of East and West. And this, together with 
differences of language and difficulties of communication, 
cut off our own ancestors from the benefits of the civilisa- 
tion that grew up in eastern Europe. The other element 
of peril was the new Christian spirit of democracy. This 
is not the time, nor am I of the race, to cry out against 
democracy! But I may say that between democracy and 
autocracy lies a hair line which is not easy to draw. 
Of this fact recent events in Russia are the best possible 
witness. For a literal democracy is of course an impossible 
state of society. No man is born free of his circumstances 

309 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

or of obligations to his fellowmen, nor can all men be 
born equal in ability and opportunity. In any concerted 
effort, moreover, some one must lead. Otherwise the 
effort is bound to fail. The attempt of democracy is to 
find the man best fitted to lead, to give him his chance, 
and to prevent him from abusing it. In outward form, 
therefore, democracy and autocracy must necessarily re- 
semble each other. The difference is that the democratic 
leader is obeyed because he is the delegate of the mass, 
not because he is the master of the mass. 

Any new state of freedom, however, naturally produces 
a confusion of aims and personalities which does not 
subside until events give them their proper level. What 
was unfortunate for the world in the coming of Christian- 
ity was that the new freedom put the most ignorant and 
bigotted peasant not on a par with the greatest prince or 
the most enlightened philosopher, but above him — if 
that prince or that philosopher did not chance to be of 
the new religion. And it happens to be a trait of the most 
educated minds that they do not, in general, show the 
most enthusiasm for movements of an emotional rather 
than of an intellectual kind. The consequences for the 
old Greek learning were therefore of the most disastrous. 
For so general a zeal for the new religion made it a credit- 
able thing to do away with the symbols of the old. We 
shall never know how many priceless works of art, how 
many manuscripts for which we would now pay untold 
sums, were wilfully destroyed with the best intentions in 
the world. So did it come about that a pious monk would 
erase a play of /Eschylus, a poem of Pindar, or a treatise 
of Plato, in order to have room to inscribe his views of 
the nature of the Trinity. And there grew up that dreary 

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patristic literature which was the one literary achievement 
of the time, and which now rests undisturbed in its dust. 
Constantine himself set an unfortunate example when 
he abolished the Greek Asclepieia, not so much temples 
as hospitals, in which the tradition of Hippocrates had 
been preserved. More pitiless enemies of the old learning 
were the emperors Theodosius I and II, under whom the 
zeal of the church reached such a pitch that Theophilus, 
Bishop of Alexandria, caused the books and the scientific 
instruments of the Museum and the Serapeion to be 
destroyed. The appliances of Hero and Archimedes 
were regarded as the tools of some dark magic by the very 
men who believed relics to possess supernatural power. 
Clement of Alexandria fulminated against the horrible 
practise of maintaining private baths — out of which 
tradition it grew that the Crusaders were looked upon by 
the Byzantines and the Saracens alike as the filthiest and 
most barbarous of men. St. Augustine, first among the 
four great fathers of the church, a propos of the correct 
Alexandrian theory of the globe, pronounced it impossible 
that the opposite side of the earth could be inhabited, 
since the Bible mentioned no such people among the 
descendants of Adam. Under Cyril, successor of Theo- 
philus in the see of Alexandria, the gifted Hypatia, who 
represented in the fifth century the culture and elegance 
of the older time, was mobbed, stripped, and stabbed to 
death in the city of the Ptolemies. And even so enlight- 
ened a sovereign as Justinian the Great, himself of humble 
origin, having been born in Bulgaria of what may have 
been Albanian stock, finally closed the schools of Athens 
and Alexandria and drove their inmates to take refuge 
in the more tolerant East. 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

Now it happened that this took place shortly before 
another abrupt change in the Mediterranean world — the 
rise of the Arabs. But the Hellenisation of the East — 
to use a word which must be applied with discretion — 
was by no means the work of Justinian alone. As early 
as the sixth century B. C. Greece and Persia had come 
into contact through the wars between Media and Lydia. 
The greater wars of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes in the fol- 
lowing century had renewed and broadened this contact, 
which is reflected in the architecture of Persepolis. And 
the wars of Alexander and his successors carried the Hel- 
lenic influence as far as Bactria, in the region of Bokhara, 
and India, founding Greek cities all the way from Antioch 
in Syria and Seleucia on the Tigris to Merv in Khorasan, 
and beyond. And from the third century B. C. until the 
appearance of the Arabs in the seventh century A. D. 
the Parthian and Sasanian kings of Persia were constantly 
in relation, hostile or otherwise, with their Hellenised 
neighbours of Syria and Asia Minor or with the Roman 
emperors. During this thousand years the Persians 
several times extended their borders to the Black Sea or 
the Mediterranean, while the Romans reached the Per- 
sian Gulf and long maintained the Euphrates as their 
eastern frontier. I need not repeat here the history of 
this confused period. But it is interesting to recall that 
at the battle of Carrhae, in Mesopotamia, in 53 B. C., 
10,000 Roman soldiers were captured by the Parthians 
and deported to Merv; that the battle where Caesar came, 
saw, and conquered took place at the modern Turkish 
town of Zilleh, near Sivas and not so far from the upper 
Euphrates; that an older brother of Shapur the Great was 
disinherited because of his Hellenistic leanings and took 

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refuge with Constantine the Great, who afterward wrote 
to the Sasanian king with regard to the status of Chris- 
tians in Persia; that JuHan the Apostate lost his Hfe while 
fighting against the Persians on the Tigris in 363; that in 
489 when Zeno closed the schools of Edessa, the modern 
Urfa, they were immediately reopened at Nisibis; that 
when Justinian in turn closed the schools of Athens in 
529, five Greek philosophers found asylum with Nushir- 
van in Persia, and at his request translated Plato and 
Aristotle into Persian. This was the Sasanian king who 
founded or enlarged the school of Gand-i-Shapur — Junda- 
i-Sabur, in its Arabicised form, identified by Le Strange 
with the modern village of Shahabad between Shuster 
and Dizful — which was perhaps the one provided with 
Greek physicians by the emperor Aurelian and which, 
under Jewish and Nestorian teachers, became a celebrated 
centre of philosophical and medical study, at a time when 
such studies were despised in Europe. 

The Nestorians, indeed, played a part in bringing to- 
gether the East and the West which has almost been for- 
gotten. The seacoast of Asia Minor had been Hellen- 
ised from great antiquity. But after the conquests of 
Alexander and the disruption of the Jewish kingdoms 
Syria was not slow to feel the Greek influence. Antioch 
in particular rose into prominence as another centre of 
learning, which contributed both to the Neo-Platonic and 
to the patristic literature. It was there, in fact, that the 
name of Christian first came into use, and there did St. 
Simeon Stylites stand on his uncomfortable pillar. The 
isolation of Antioch from the West, however, and its 
relative proximity to Persia, naturally enough brought 
about a distinction between the Christians of Asia and 

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PERSIAN MINIATURES 

their European brothers. The Syrian Christians had 
churches as far East as Tus and Merv in 334. In 409 
they were officially recognised by Yezdigird I, the Sasan- 
ian king of Persia; and in 410 the Council of Seleucia, 
twin city of Ctesiphon, showed how far the East was 
from the West by approving the famous Council of 
Nicaea, held almost a hundred years earlier. This 
separation became a schism in 431, when the Council of 
Ephesus condemned Nestorius, Syrian Bishop of Con- 
stantinople, and his followers for their heretical views of 
the supernatural birth of Christ. And the closing of the 
schools of Edessa by the emperor Zeno prepared the final 
break between the Greeks and the Nestorians. Never- 
theless the latter continued to be the representatives in 
the East of the Hellenic culture. The fact that they were 
accounted heretics perhaps encouraged them to trans- 
late into Syriac the philosophers of Athens and Alexandria. 
At the same time their missionaries pushed on into Asia. 
By the year 500 Samarkand was a Nestorian bishopric, 
and the first Nestorians arrived in China in 635, a few 
years after the first Mohammedans. There exists in 
China to-day a monument which in 1907 was still stand- 
ing in Hsi-ang-fu or Chang-an, capital of the T'ang dy- 
nasty, recording their presence there in 781. In 845 
they, like the Mohammedans, were affected by a decree 
closing the Buddhist monasteries. And in the farther 
East they ultimately became merged with the followers of 
other sects, cut off as they were from their own country 
by the triumph of Islam and the disturbances caused in 
Central Asia by the Turks. Many Turks, nevertheless, 
were converted by Nestorians before falling under the 
influence of the Arabs. Prester John, about whom Marco 

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Polo and the Crusaders spread so many legends, was a 
Nestorian Turkish chief of Central Asia. In Transoxiana, 
Persia, and Syria the Nestorians long continued to flour- 
ish and to keep alive a remnant of Greek civilisation. 
Their patriarchs reigned at Seleucia-Ctesiphon from 496 
to 762, removing under the Abbasid Caliphs to Baghdad. 
And when that city was destroyed in 1258 by the Mon- 
golian Hulagu, he, out of deference to his Christian wife, 
a Kerait Turkish princess of the same tribe as the mythical 
Prester John, spared the life of the Nestorian Patriarch — 
whose successors and whose flock were only dispersed 
in the fourteenth century by the conquests of Timur. 

Thus was the ground prepared for that astonishing 
Saracen renaissance of which Avicennawas one of the most 
important figures. When the Arabs emerged in the 
seventh century from their all but unknown peninsula, 
they broke into a very different world from the one which 
had seen the Persian Wars, the empire of Alexander, the 
Augustan age, the founding of Constantinople. Persia 
was long past its heroic time, while of the great cities 
that nurtured the civilisation of which we are the heirs, 
in Constantinople alone did there remain a spark of the 
antique light. The rest of Europe was sunk in ignorance 
and superstition, overrun by the barbarians whose de- 
scendants were to burn the library of Louvain and destroy 
the cathedral of Rheims. Everywhere was discord or 
decay. In quick succession the champions of the new 
faith conquered Syria, Egypt, Persia, thence marching 
east and west to the centre of Asia and to the shores of 
the Atlantic. The battle of Tours, which marked the 
limit of their advance into Europe, was fought in 732, 
only a hundred years after the death of the Prophet. 

315 



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Far be it from me to deplore the victory of Charles 
Martel. But there is no shadow of doubt that if the 
Caliphs of Spain had not been held back behind the 
Pyrenees, western Europe would have been civilised 
much more rapidly. And the most astonishing thing 
about it is that the country from which the conquerors 
came had not even the memory of greatness. The Proph- 
et himself, capable of dictating what is said to be the 
masterpiece of Arabic literature, was incapable of writing 
his own poetry or of reading the chapters of the Koran 
which others transcribed. As for his first three suc- 
cessors, they were preeminently men of the sword. Yet 
so far as contemporary records go it is far more certain 
that the Greek Bishop Theophilus destroyed the books of 
Alexandria than that Abu Bekr did, the legend of his 
burning them in the public baths not having been in- 
vented till six hundred years later. And Omar built a 
magnificent mosque in Jerusalem, while one of the Om- 
mayads caused mosaicists to come from Constantinople 
to decorate the church he turned into a mosque and his 
successors invited to Damascus both Jews and Christians 
of learning. It was, at any rate, that sudden maturing 
of the Arab genius, an epic example of the liberation, of 
the exaltation, which may be produced by a widening of 
horizons. And the civilisation of Greece, brought into 
contact with the simple and ardent spirit of Arabia, 
flowered once more in a miraculous way. 

Only three or four times in history has there been a 
period of so much intellectual eagerness, of such creative 
heat, of tolerance so rare, as when the Arab and the Greek 
met on the borders of Persia to perform their miracle, 
aided by the Syrian and the Jew. For the heart of the 

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miracle was not Damascus but Baghdad, and all its 
complicated machinery was set in motion in the brief 
seventy years between the laying out of his new capital 
by the second Abbasid Caliph, Mansur, in 762 and the 
death of his great-grandson Mamun in 833. Damascus 
already had a history and traditions when the Om- 
mayads settled there. Baghdad — meaning God-given 
— had none, save as a sleepy Persian hamlet on the 
Tigris inhabited chiefly by Nestorian monks. In 
one of their monasteries Mansur took up his residence 
while he built his "Abode of Peace" — he and his 
Persian vizier the Barmecide, son of a Mage from 
Balkh. This association was typical of the spirit in which 
Mansur gathered around himself craftsmen, artists, and 
scholars of the different races of the land, in his ambition 
to rival the legendary splendour of Constantinople. The 
result, for art, was the Saracenic school whose works strew 
the track of the Arab from Transoxiana to Spain. Of the 
result for learning, Avicenna is but one example. And the 
policy of Mansur was followed by his immediate successors. 
His grandson Harun al Rashid, otherwise Aaron the Ortho- 
dox, famous throughout the world for his love of the 
humanities, built a hospice in Jerusalem for Christian 
pilgrims and granted Charlemagne the custody of the keys 
of the Holy Sepulchre. As for Mamun, born of a Persian 
mother and brought up among Persian and Greek philoso- 
phers, he was a builder of libraries and hospitals, a splendid 
patron of letters, and the founder of that school of trans- 
lators which brought Greek philosophy into the ken of the 
East. 

This great work was all the more remarkable because 
Greek learning had at that time almost died out in its 

317 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

own land. The task, as I have said, had already been 
begun by the Syrians. The schools of Antioch, Edessa, 
and Nisibis, and to a lesser degree that of Gand-i-Shapur, 
had translated many of the Greek writers into Syriac and 
Persian. Then the Ommayads, followed by Mansur, 
had caused not a few of these versions to be turned into 
Arabic. Under Mamun, however, the earlier and hastier 
translations were systematically revised and new ones 
made. The enHghtened Caliph even attempted, without 
too great success, to buy or to borrow Greek manuscripts 
in Constantinople. For the Syrians had worked chiefly 
from the editions of Alexandria, often unhappily edited 
by the Neo-Platonists. As it was, their preference for 
the latter and for Aristotle brought it about that Plato 
became less familiar to the Arabs than Plotinus, Porphyry, 
and the Almagest, while the poets and dramatists, alas, 
remained unknown to them. Harun al Rashid, to be 
sure, had Homer translated into Syriac, though not into 
Arabic. But all the philosophical and scientific specula- 
tion of the Greeks, from Pythagoras down, became avail- 
able to the Arabs in their own tongue. And when at last 
Europe began to take an interest in learning, it was found 
that Galen, for instance, was more complete in Arabic than 
in his own tongue. 

The influence upon the impressionable Arabs of this 
glimpse into a new world was prodigious. The political 
authority of Baghdad soon ceased to be acknowledged 
east of the Zagros Mountains or west of the Euphrates; 
but in every country of Islam libraries, schools, and hospit- 
als sprang up to perpetuate the work ot the Abbasids. 
And those institutions inspired a scholarship far worthier 
of the name than anything known in Europe outside of 

3.8 



AVICENNA 

Constantinople. It was, of course, a scholarship much 
more confused, much less critical, than European scholar- 
ship ultimately became. Mansur, like every one else in 
his time, took a deep interest in astrology. Yet that in- 
terest led back to the study of astronomy which had been 
interrupted in Alexandria by the zeal of Theophilus. 
Mamun once more caused a meridian of the earth to be 
measured, and, less bigoted than St. Augustine with 
regard to the form of the earth, caused geography to be 
taught from a globe. The Saracens adopted the simple 
Indian numerals which we call Arabic, perfected and 
named the study of algebra, mapped the heavens, devel- 
oped the science of navigation, rectified the calendar, made 
experiments in optics and refraction, devised telescopes. 
The Spanish Moors, long before the time of Copernicus 
or Tycho Brahe, built the Giralda Tower in Seville for 
an observatory. And when the Spaniards reentered the 
city in 1248, they so little understood the use of the 
astronomical instruments they found there that they pi- 
ously consecrated the Giralda as a bell tower. 

Out of alchemy, too, out of the search for the Philoso- 
pher's Stone and the Elixir of Life, was born a true chemis- 
try. A ninth-century alchemist of Baghdad, somewhat 
vaguely known as Jafar, bears the same relation to chemis- 
try that Hippocrates does to medicine. Before his time 
no acid stronger than vinegar was known; he was the first 
to discover nitric acid and aqua regia. His follower, 
Rhazes, or Ibn Zakarya, of Rei, experimenting in precipi- 
tates, gases, and the metaphysical spirits of things, pro- 
duced absolute alcohol and sulphuric acid. Phosphorus, 
described by the Saracens as an artificial carbuncle, was 
another of their contributions to chemistry. They 

319 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

made pioneer calculations in specific gravity. And they, 
while our ancestors were treating disease by means of 
charms, amulets, and exorcisms, began to apply chemistry 
to medicine. If it was but a beginning, and if their con- 
tributions now seem slight, we must remember that the 
only advance in medicine from the time of Erosistratus 
and Hierophilus of Alexandria down to the seventeenth 
century was made by the Arabs. Among the 237 treatises 
of Rhazes, who flourished from about 850 to about 932, 
was one giving the earliest description of measles and 
small pox, and adumbrating the germ theory. Of Avi- 
cenna and the place he held in mediaeval medicine I have 
already spoken. Abulcasis, or Abul Kasim, a Spanish 
contemporary of his, practised surgery little less scien- 
tifically than he would have done to-day, and wrote a 
surgical treatise in which is found the first known descrip- 
tion of the syringe. Averroes later conceived the idea of 
making individual studies of the different diseases and 
their treatment, eventually carried out not by himself 
but by one of his pupils. 

In other directions the Saracens made progress no less 
marked. They anticipated Newton in the study of 
gravity, though it remained for the great Englishman to 
make a universal application of the principle. They were 
much nearer those other Englishmen Darwin and Wallace 
in their view of the development of life than their Christian 
contemporaries. I shall not claim for the former the 
superiority in art and letters, though Saracenic architec- 
ture, the "Thousand and One Nights," and the important 
Mohammedan literature of travel, geography, and history 
were of surprisingly early date. As concerns breeding, 
habits, and comfort the Arabs had an unquestioned su- 

320 



AVICENNA 

periority. The Saracen cities were paved and clean 
long before those of France. London was seven hundred 
years later than Cordova in lighting her streets at night. 
The first clock seen in Europe was a present to Charle- 
magne from Harun al Rashid. Through the Moors of 
Spain were introduced to our fathers such novelties as 
paper, cotton, rice, sugar, and several fruits and flowers 
previously unknown to them. And there is no end to the 
European words derived from Arabic or Persian. 

Was it weariness, in the end, that caused the Saracen 
inspiration to flicker and die out? Was it the constant 
hammering of Turks and Christians, the hopeless dis- 
integration of that empire which had stretched from the 
Oxus to the Pillars of Hercules? At any rate, the pendu- 
lum of history swung again, waking Europe up from its 
thousand years of reaction. And it is strange how there 
seems to be something potent and immortal in that old 
Greek learning, which finally wrought again in Europe 
the miracle it had wrought in Asia so long before. Yet 
could anything be stranger than the journey it made, 
from land to land, from tongue to tongue, around the 
whole circuit of the Mediterranean, till it came back 
through Spain to Europe, to the farther shore of its own 
Ionian Sea? During the twelfth century there arose in 
Spain and Sicily schools of translators like those of Edessa 
and Baghdad, whose work it was to render into Latin, 
generally from Arabic, sometimes from Syriac or Hebrew, 
what was left of Greek literature. A little of it had been 
spared in Constantinople; but Constantinople was too far 
away and too hostile to be of any help. Only after the 
Crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204 did there appear 
in theWestafeworiginal Greek manuscripts. Inthemean- 

321 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

time there grew up the mendicant orders, among whom, 
and particularly among the Dominicans, were great friends 
of learning. Then in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
were founded in turn the universities of Bologna, Paris, 
and Oxford, earliest of their kind in the West, inaugurating 
the so-called scholastic period. The German universities 
came a little later, as befitted a race not converted till the 
eighth century by English Benedictines! This scholastic 
period occupied the thirteenth and much of the fourteenth 
centuries, and was a time of busy translating, comparing, 
revising, philosophising, and theologising, to say nothing 
of anathematising. For the church was slow to give up its 
old antipathy to the Greeks; and here worse heathen 
than Aristotle were concerned, under whose wing Arab 
and Jewish doctors not a few made their appearance in 
Christendom. 

So it was that Avicenna, the Persian of Bokhara and 
Hamadan, became one of the great names of mediaeval 
Europe, exercising an empire over men's minds such as 
was exercised scarcely by Aristotle himself. In 1453 
Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks. The 
Greek refugees who fled to Italy took with them precious 
manuscripts, and the Renaissance received its final im- 
pulse. Yet in spite of the continued hostility of the 
church, in spite of the natural ill will between Europe and 
Asia, in spite of the just preference of scholars for original 
Greek manuscripts to those which had been three or 
four times translated, the last of the Arab philosophers of 
the East acquired so great credit that not until 1650, when 
medicine finally began to feel the impulse of the Renais- 
sance, was Avicenna's Canon dropped from the curricula 
of Montpellier and Louvain. The book had then, since 

322 



AVICENNA 

its first printings in Naples, Rome, and Venice, passed 
through thirty or more Latin editions. And to the end 
of time no one who wishes to acquaint himself with the 
learning of the Near East, to study the history of philos- 
ophy or medicine, or to understand the evolution of 
European culture, can escape knowing the name of 
Avicenna. 

Such, O Virtue, O Justice, O Eternal Irony of Life, are 
the accidents which may befall a plumber of infinity, who 
sought truth not only in wells, and wisdom on the lips of 
dancers! 



?23 




XIX 
THE CARAVAN 

IVith my own eyes I saw in the desert 

That the deliberate man outstripped him who had hurried on. 
The wind-footed steed is broken down in his course, 
While the camel-driver jogs on with his beast to the end of the 
journey. 

Sadi: the flower garden 



ONE of my study windows, catching all the sun 
of the south, faces a narrow tilted country of 
gardens, darkly walled by a semicircle of moun- 
tains. One of my bedroom windows gives me 
a glimpse of sparser gardens, and the clay-coloured town, 
and the plain that dips and rises delicately against the 
north. But both rooms look east, into the desert. 

It is the kind of desert which the Persians call hiaban, 
not the vaster and more desolate lut. Beyond our own, 
however, no garden wall ventures into it. Neither house 

324 



THE CARAVAN 

nor poplar breaks the simplicity of its flowing lines. The 
empty land droops away toward the left, intercepted only 
by the Musalla, that barren bluff which archaeologists like 
to fancy the site of seven-walled Ecbatana. Not quite 
opposite my windows a smaller hill, bare and pointed 
like a cone, pricks the horizon. Beyond it lies an in- 
visible hollow, the farther edge of which marks the limit 
of my visible world. 

Of the sights to be seen from the four sides of our house, 
this view offers least. Yet because it is mine I like it, 
and because it is so open and solitary, and because the 
faithful Persian sun rarely disappoints me there of his 
morning miracle, and because at night stars hang there of a 
brilliancy I have never seen, and so low that I can watch 
them from my bed. And 1 am new enough from the West 
never to forget that those windows look into Asia. Be- 
yond that uneven rim of the East lies Kum. Beyond 
Kum is the lut, that great desert which has small reason 
to be less renowned than Gobi or the Sahara. Beyond the 
lut are Afghanistan, and Kashmir, and Tibet. 

In the morning the sun looks strange to me, because he 
is fresh from Tibet and Kashmir and Afghanistan. At 
night the stars make me wonder what other watchers 
see them — what riders of camels, what prowlers of the 
dark, what sitters by red embers. How many times have 
I made in imagination that journey eastward from my 
window, across wastes of sand and salt and poisoned 
water, through forests and glaciers that prop the sky, 
into valleys the wildest and most secret of the earth — 
that journey which no man of the West could make alone, 
or undisguised, and come alive into the uplands of China! 
And if he did, no man of all he met could understand the 

325 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

reason of his coming. They have no curiosity about us, 
the lands we live in, the things we live for. Why have we 
so continuing a curiosity about them? Is it that in those 
distant and silent places we would not once hear a factory 
whistle or see a railroad track? Is it the lure of their 
jealous seclusion? Of their cloudy antiquity? Or is it a 
simple astonishment that men can be content with so 
little — fmd the sight of the sun enough, and the sound of 
known voices? Who knows but there might be in it 
some vague ancestral stirring of nostalgia, or a secret 
question of our own unrest? What if, after all, they of 
the East see the end from the beginning, and live a life 
more intense than we? But even there whistles begin 
to sound. Nearer and nearer creep the rails that thread 
the ends of the world. And what then? 

I could never tell all I see in the desert at night. 

In the daytime I am more concerned with what passes 
between our garden wall and the crumpled rim of the 
horizon. There is no great passing on that tawny slope 
save of light and shadow, for the highways all march in 
other directions out of the town. Runnels of water flash 
in the sun at their seasons. In the autumn and in the 
spring oxen tickle the earth with the little wooden plough 
of Asia. There is a time when I watch the rippling of 
wheat like a lake. That is also the time when T may 
hear, heightened by distance, a melancholy singing. Peas- 
ants occasionally pass, with russet rags flapping about 
bare knees. A rare horseman gallops afar, his dark 
mantle eddying behind him. Mules and donkeys are 
less rare, tinkling from nowhere to nowhere. 

But silence is so much the note of the place that I 
was astonished one winter afternoon to hear a new sound, 

326 



THE CARAVAN 

a jingle-jangle that grew louder as I listened. I was 
the more astonished because snow was deep on the ground, 
and passers had been fewer than ever. I went to the, win- 
dow to look. 

Camels! Out of the crack between Musalla and the 
town they came, the dark line of them lengthening 
obliquely across the snow till it reached the corner of 
the garden above ours. I am a child about camels. I 
shall never see enough of them. It is not only their 
strangeness, however, which for us of the West makes 
them the symbol of Asia. They are immensely decora- 
tive in themselves — though they are so much the colour 
of the lands they live in that they have a curious power of 
invisibility, for creatures so large, unless you catch them 
against the sky. But the snow brought out the sil- 
houettes of these the more fantastically because of the 
loads lashed on either side of their humps. The pommel 
of one saddle spindled up into a staff gay with coloured 
wool, ending in a flat hand of brass. I caught glimpses 
of saddle-cloths and big saddlebags, woven like the 
precious rugs of the country. Necklaces of bright beads 
made another touch of colour, or dangling plaques of 
beads, with much blue in them to ward off the Evil Eye. 
And the camels wore almost as many bells as beads. 
Some carried them around their necks in strings. A few 
beasts, bigger than the rest, had one great copper bell 
slung from the saddle, which rang out a slow ding-dong 
amid the general jingle-jangle. It made one think of 
Charpentier's "Impressions d'ltalie,'' and the way he 
suggests the sound of mule bells. But this was something 
deeper and wilder, evoking the endless marches of the 
desert. 

327 



PERSIAN MINIATURES 

There were more camels in that caravan than I had 
ever seen before. It did not occur to me to count them 
until many of them were out of sight. Then I counted 
nearly three hundred. They marched single file in groups 
of six or seven, each group roped together like barges 
in a tow and led by a man. Many of the men had an 
odd Mongolian look in their tight skin caps, with the fur 
or lamb's wool inside. The eyes of almost all of them 
were inflamed from the glare of the sun on the snow. 
Where had they come from? Where were they going? 
I had no tongue to ask, nor could I have understood if 
they told me. 

They disappeared at last among the bare gardens. 
But that strange, complicated music, punctuated by the 
deep notes of the big copper bells, sounded so long in the 
thin winter air that I could not be quite sure when it 
ceased to sound. Indeed I often hear it now at night, 
when I look at the low stars of the desert and think of 
Afghanistan, and Kashmir, and Tibet. 



328 




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